New species of Araceae from Venezuela and the Guianas

The Araceae of Venezuela and the Guianas are reasonably well-known owing to George Bunting who worked for many years on the aroids of Venezuela and published a key to the species of Venezuela, with diagnostic characteristics (but no full descriptions and with no illustrations) (Bunting 1979). Croat & Lambert (1986) published a revision of the Araceae of Venezuela which included an updated checklist as well as full descriptions of 171 of the 274 taxa occurring in Venezuela. Bunting further contributed to our knowledge of northeastern South America by publishing the Araceae for the Flora of the Venezuelan Guayana (Bunting 1995), which included 189 taxa. The region of the Guiana Highlands has also been studied and a review of the Araceae was published in the Flora of the Guianas Checklist (Croat 1992). Another work that covered this region in detail was the Araceae treatment in the Vascular Plants of Central French Guiana (Croat 1997), which includes 54 taxa and excellent illustrations. For Suriname most of the work was carried out by Anni. E. Jonker-Verhoef and Fredrik P. Jonker who worked out of the University of Utrecht in Holland (Jonker-Verhoef & Jonker 1953a-b, 1959, 1966, 1966,1968). A recent review of undetermined collections from the Guianas and Venezuela have resulted in the discovery of new species and these are described here. Classification of the forest vegetation in the habitat notes of the new species follows Holdridge & al. (1971).