The botanical field notes prepared by Humboldt and Bonpland in tropical America

Abstract

On their famous expedition to tropical America (1799-1804) Humboldt and Bonpland recorded plant descriptions, preliminary determinations, localities and habitat information in seven collecting books, which are kept today in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The entries were numbered in a single chronological sequence from 1 to 4528 and the numbers cited on the field labels. Together with the herbarium specimens and the field drawings this material later formed the basis for the botanical parts of the voluminous Voyage aux Régions Équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. Bonpland, Willdenow and notably Kunth, while working on the specimens in Paris, added determinations to the collecting books, which permit a very precise analysis of the expedition and the later publication process.

Bonpland and Humboldt Specimens, Field Notes, and Herbaria; New Insights from a Study of the Monocotyledons Collected in Venezuela

“…The literature concerning the travels in the New World of Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769Humboldt ( -1859 and Aimé Jacques Alexandre Goujaud Bonpland (1773Bonpland ( -1858 is enormous and the impact of these explorers on a wide range of biological disciplines such as taxonomy, floristics, ecology, and biogeography has been detailed in hundreds of scientific papers (see STEARN, 1968;STAFLEU & COWAN, 1979). Of greater interest to us are recent studies that have focused on the botanical collections Bonpland and Humboldt gathered during their journey (HIEPKO, 1987(HIEPKO, , 2006LACK, 2003LACK, , 2009, the field notes associated with these collections (LACK, 2004a(LACK, , 2004b, and illustrations of the plants they collected, including the "self impressions" of a number of these plants (LACK, 2001). The study of particular taxonomic groups has provided important insights into the way in which these collections were handled and distributed.…”

Los hermanos Goujaud Bonpland: dos enfoques complementarios del conocimiento botánico

“…Meanwhile, it cannot be excluded that some of these original collections and not only duplicates reached any of the herbaria cited as depositories of other Bonpland and Humboldt specimens. An additional hypothesis suggests that the missing collections are explained by the fact that neither Bonpland numbered all herbarium specimens nor ever existed a complete set documenting all entries in the collection field notes (Lack, 2004a;Stauffer et Stauffer, 2017).…”

“…5), containing the description of all the collections gathered in the expedition (Hiepko, 2006;Stauffer et al, 2012). The latter was recovered in the last minute by Kunth before Bonpland left France (Lack, 2004a), whereas the former traveled to Argentina indeed but were finally sent by Bonpland back to Paris in 1832. This set of specimens was incorporated in the general herbarium (P), where material used by Kunth for the publication of the Nov. Gen. Sp.…”

A revision of the Dulcamaroid Clade of Solanum L. (Solanaceae)

“…It is likely that these are based on the same gathering (see Lack 2004; Knapp 2007) but in the absence of direct evidence I have considered them to be heterotypic; the sheets in P and B-W differ in leaf morphology and may not be from the same plants. I have lectotypified Solanum cyrrhosum with the more completely labelled of two sheets in P-Bonpl.…”