Wood, Jeffrey J.; Beaman, Teofila E.; Lamb, Anthony; Chan Chew Lun & Beaman, John H. The Orchids of Mount Kinabalu (Two volumes in slipcase) , .

9789838121323 Very well illustrated, two volumes in slipcase, quarto, pp xvi, 436; vi, 726, a very good set in dustwrappers. EXTREMELY HEAVY, WIGHING 5.5 KILOS BEFORE PACKING. EXTRA POSTAGE WILL BE REQUIRED. [This two-volume work provides a detailed account of the orchid flora of Mount Kinabalu situated in the Malaysian state of Sabah (formerly British North Borneo) which, at 4095 m, is the highest peak between the Himalayas and Papua (Indonesian New Guinea). Kinabalu was declared Malaysia’s first World Heritage Site by UNESCO in November 2000. The Kinabalu massif, encompassing only about 1250 square km, is smaller than most English counties, yet the authors list an astonishing number of orchids for such a small area. Nearly 38% of the orchid species are known from just one locality and about 16% have been collected only once. The Kinabalu vascular plant flora may include as many as 5000/6000 species, and is one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse floras in the world. Additionally, Mount Kinabalu has been a centre of extremely active plant evolution and speciation and presents a spectacular natural laboratory for studying these processes. Bearing in mind that much of the mountain, especially the remote and inaccessible northern side, is still poorly explored, one can get some idea of its biological richness. Mount Kinabalu is mostly composed of granite together with distinctive areas of ultramafic substrate. Together with its ultramafic satellite, Mount Tembuyuken, it forms the major part of a much visited national park and has been described by co-author John Beaman as holding one of the richest assemblages of plants in the world. Its forests also support a fascinating array of creatures such as the Kinabalu Ferret Badger and the Banded Linsang. Its slopes are home to a 30 cm long giant orange terrestrial leech which feeds on giant blue earthworms. The bird fauna is equally prolific and includes many intriguingly named species including the Bornean Whistling Thrush, Chestnut-crested Yuhina, Friendly Bush-warbler and Whitehead’s Spiderhunter. An integrated system of computer programs used for data editing and printing an enumeration of the orchid flora of Mount Kinabalu was written in the dBASE IV programming language by Reed Beaman. A data management program, KINABALU, allows for accessing any aspect of the database through a menu system. Seven principal relational data tables are used in the production of the enumeration of taxa. Two of these tables contain data on specimens including types. Taxonomic, nomenclatural, geographical, and bibliographic information is linked from other tables. Various procedures permit creating and editing the tables. Menus facilitate inputting and editing specimen and taxon data, globally replacing various expressions such as changing an author’s name or abbreviation, indexing and querying the database, computing a summary of elevation ranges for taxa, numbering taxa, making an index to numbered collections, and printing enumerations of all taxa in the database or selected genera. The data gathered grew from a proposed simple checklist into a 411-page book, authored by Jeffrey Wood together with Reed and John Beaman, detailing the diverse orchid flora, which was published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1993. This precursor to the present two-volume work formed volume two of John Beaman’s five-volume inventory of the entire vascular plant flora entitled The Plants of Mount Kinabalu.] (Book ref. 006734)  £220.00

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