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Description

In 1944 Fay Hyland and Ferdinand Steinmetz published The Woody Plants of Maine: Their Occurrence and Distribution. This small bulletin catalogs the state's native and exotic trees, shrubs, and woody vines. In-state distributions are given for 513 taxa, including 366 species, Ill varieties and named forms, and 36 hybrids. Hyland collected information for this comprehensive work from three sources: a systematic field survey of the state which he personally conducted between 1933 and 1939; a review of botanical publications on Maine flora; and herbarium records from the New England Botanical Club, Gray Herbarium, Arnold Arboretum, the Boston Society of Natural History, the Portland Society of Natural History, and several private collections. Eighteen thousand records were assembled through the field survey alone. These records, along with those tabulated from herbaria, were plotted by species on small-scale (1:1,000,000) maps of Maine. Written descriptions of each taxon were summarized from the resulting maps and compiled into the bulletin described above. The distribution maps themselves, however, were never published. The single (original) copy of Hyland's maps has been kept in the Special Collections of the University of Maine's Fogler Library since 1944. The ink used to mark species occurrences on those maps is now fading sufficiently to endanger the records.

To preserve this valuable resource and to evaluate patterns of species' richness in Maine, maps of all native species were digitized using AUTOCAD (1988). In all, 240 species meet Hyland's definition of woody plants ("those plants with ligneous, perennial [biennial in Rubus] stems which increase in diameter each year by formation of annual rings") and the criterion of natural occurrence. This includes varieties and subspecies that are the sole representative of a given species as well as 10 taxa whose distributions were not documented by Hyland (Table 1). Because new stations have been documented for many species in the nearly 50 years since the original distribution maps were prepared, specimens in the University of Maine Herbarium and the publication Rare Vascular Plants of Maine were used to update Hyland's maps. A new record was noted only if it clarified or extended the range boundary of a species.

Document Type

Bulletin

ISSN

0734-9548

Volume

830

Publication Date

7-1990

Publisher

Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station

City

Orono

Keywords

Revised Woody Plants Atlas, Fay Hyland

Disciplines

Botany

B830: An Atlas of the Native Woody Plants of Maine: A Revision of the Hyland Maps

Included in

Botany Commons

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