Biogeographical Relationships and Diversity in the Peruvian Flora Reported by Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón: Vegetation, Uses and Anthropology.

The Royal Spanish Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru in the 18th century was one of the most important European expeditions to American territories. Using the herbarium sheets of Ruiz and Pavón (Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid) and their edited works, manuscripts and expedition diaries, we have constructed a database of the collected and observed flora, which has served as the basis for a map containing all of the Peruvian localities of the expedition. Based on the method of bioclimatic belts and our own observations, we have deduced to which type of vegetation the flora studied in the expedition belongs.

A Phytosociological Study on Andean Rainforests of Peru, and a Comparison with the Surrounding Countries.

This work is a phytosociological approach to the montane rainforests of Peru with the aim of advancing on the diversity of plant communities, which we had already begun in previous research. From 364 phytosociological plots and 3389 species of the South American tropics, we have developed a cluster, using the Sørensen index, to know the similarities between the forests and their parallelism with bioclimatic conditions. After studying the existence of characteristic groups of the Peruvian forests, we have established different communities and phytosociological units for Peru.

[A phytosociological interpretation of vegetation from sandy hills of the Peruvian desert].

The vegetation of the sandy hills ("lomas") constitutes the main originality of the Peruvian and Chilean desert with a high number of endemics that shapes the vicarious associations. In this work, a phytosociological view of sandy environments of the Peruvian coastal desert is presented. According to the Braun-Blanquet method, we have made up 32 phytosociological inventories and added 138 ones from others authors.