Two New Species of Cynometra (Leguminosae: Caesalpinioideae) from Mayotte in the Comoro Archipelago

Abstract

Between 1995 and 1998, an intensive inventory of the plants of Mayotte (French territory in the Comoro Archipelago) was conducted by the Service de l'Environnement et de la Foret of Mayotte, in collaboration with the Laboratoire de Phane'rogamie of the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, mainly concentrating on trees and shrubs. This work has substantially increased the number of collections for the island, whose flora was known previously only from collections made in the nineteenth century by botanists such as Humblot and Boivin, and a few made by Floret and Bernardi in the 1970s (for more details of collectors in Mayotte and the Comoro Islands, see Dorr 1997). Only the older collections were used for the treatments published in the Flore de Madagascar et des Comores, and many are poor and have remained unidentified or only with a tentative determination, sometimes with unpublished manuscript names. The recent collections include many species new to Mayotte, and in some cases to the Archipelago, some new to science. Only a few have so far been described, including a new Labramia (Sapotaceae) (Labat et al. 1997), one Norhonia and two species of Chionanthus (Oleaceae) (Labat et al. in press), one Scolopia and one Erythrospermum (Flacourtiaceae) (Hul et al. 1998), and a Polyscias (Lowry et al. in press); several more will be published over the next few years. Cynometra L. is a pantropical genus with about 70 species, in the tribe Detarieae DC. as defined by Cowan & Polhill (1981), and latterly by Breteler (1995). A recent revision of the genus in Madagascar (Du Puy & Rabevohitra in press) complemented previous treatments for Africa (Leonard 1951, 1957; Brenan 1967), Indo-Malesia and the Pacific (Knaap-van Meeuven 1970), and the New World (Dwyer 1958). There are no published records of the genus in the Comoro Islands, although one old and a few recent specimens are present in the Paris herbarium.