Abstract
The first ever liverwort and hornwort checklist is provided for the Kepulauan Sunda Kecil (Lesser Sunda Islands) of Indonesia and Timor-Leste (East Timor). We report 129 accepted taxa, 12 doubtful taxa and three rejected taxa previously reported for the Lesser Sunda Islands. The list is based on over 130 literature references, including monographs, regional studies, and molecular investigations. It is clear that bryophytes from this region have been overlooked historically, and under collected, compared to seed plants, birds, and other organisms, forming a remarkable gap in the flora of Indonesia. Publications dealing with liverworts of Lesser Sunda Islands are few and scattered. We predict that further fieldwork, in addition to collections unveiled from regional herbaria, will uncover a number of new records that remain to be reported, especially considering that regionally widespread species have been recorded elsewhere.
Highlights
The Lesser Sunda Islands (LSI), known in Indonesia as Kepulauan Sunda Kecil, are an area covering a longitudinal distance of some 600 kilometres in the southeastern portion of Indonesia, extending between Java in the west and New Guinea in the east (Fig. 1)
The Lesser Sunda Islands may act as ‘stepping stones’ for animals and plants dispersing between the Greater Sunda Shelf, i.e., the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and Bali, and the Sahul Shelf, i.e., New Guinea, Australia, and their land-bridge islands (Reilly 2016)
Little botanical work has been done in the area; the area has occasionally been visited by students and researchers from nearby institutions, but publications are still lacking. This checklist will complement the survey of mosses of Lesser Sunda Islands by Touw (1992) who enumerated 367 species for the area, and complement other checklists of liverworts from Indonesia, including Java (Söderström et al 2010), Bali (Haerida 2015, 2017) as well as Sumba (Haerida et al 2020)
Summary
The Lesser Sunda Islands (LSI), known in Indonesia as Kepulauan Sunda Kecil, are an area covering a longitudinal distance of some 600 kilometres in the southeastern portion of Indonesia, extending between Java in the west and New Guinea in the east (Fig. 1). Lesser Sunda Islands include a multitude of islands, the major ones of which are Flores, Sumba, Sumbawa, and Timor. The largest of the ecoregions is “Lesser Sunda Deciduous Forests” (https://www.worldwildlife.org/ecoregions/aa0201) on Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores and west to Alor including smaller surrounding islands. Bali is the most explored island (Hegewald and van Zanten 1986; Eggers et al 1998; Schäfer-Verwimp 2006, 2009; Haerida et al 2010; Alam 2012; Heinrichs et al 2012; Girmansyah et al 2013) with 101 species accepted here. Söderström and Séneca (2008) reported only 61 number of liverworts for Lesser Sunda Islands and considered that this low number of species was the effect of the under-explored areas.
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