July 24, 1969 Dear Jane: The enclosed summary was compiled from Bob Long's field notes and from the botany files in your office. It was made in anticipation of your Honolulu visit. A copy will be sent to Dick Grossin. I learned very quickly that the botany material must be used with caution because of inconsistencies galore. A good example of this is Hull Island. In his listing of vascular plants for Hull Bob listed 23 species and annotated them. Then, however, in the general descriptive narrative for Hull he mentions 8 additional species that have occurred at one time or another. This apparently was just carelessness or haste perhaps. A person using only the list of vascular plants and assuming it was complete would leave of one-quarter of the plants collected from the island. This can be corrected if one has both the list and the narrative but what do you do if you only have the list - you're up the creek, then. For Gardner Island I found three additional species mentioned in the literature - none mentioned in either the list or in the narrative. I'd be out of luck if I hadn't been on these islands. This list shows we lack quite a bit of material particularly field notes and collection notes but also a number of the island histories (if they were in fact written). If you will notice in the column "Field Numbers Used" all those preceded by "ca." are approximations I figured out by checking his annotated lists of vascular plants and recording highest and lowest catalog numbers. We have no complete list of soil samples he took on the various islands. He also took water samples from many, if not all of the lagoons, and these were checked for salinity - we should know what these were (I have seen a few of these on a listing and Bob uses a salinity occasionally in his narratives). He ran plant quadrat studies on islands other than Howland we should have some idea regarding the results of these. It would also be of some value to know the identification of the various algae he collected - and who has these samples now. ✓ At the present time Roger and I have an interest in any material dealing with Sydney, Gardner, Hull, Birkie, Malden and Starbuck Islands. Nevertheless, it wouldn't hurt for us to get copies of everything out there that looks interesting. We are moving along slowly with the writing. Sydney is about 90% complete at this moment. Histories have been roughed out for Gardner and Malden and the vegetation section and an island description completed for Gardner. I'm now setting up for a description of Malden and then the plants of Malden and Starbuck before writing the history for the later. As I write the history section & plants & physical description Roger knocks out the species accounts. We then switch off and re-write and check for accuracy. Seems to work fairly well. We are constantly getting bogged down with data lapses and spend a good deal of time running down the source of inconsistencies, etc. I have marked those places where we are missing data. I understand that Lamoureux is responsible for writing up reports on vegetation for the Leewards so wouldn't spend much time on this. If you could devote some time to the Phoenix & Line Islands, espec. those 6 mentioned above it would certainly help. The astronauts on Apollo ll just splashed down on the edge of the northern grid which caused a certain amount of commotion around here. We had visions of the thing coming down right in the middle of a feeding flock of Sooty Terns and landing in the water KEKEK in a cloud of bird feathers and then floating around with orange streamers hanging all over it. So much for today's levity. Hope all is progressing well. Look this thing over and see if you can decipher it if not give me a buzz before heading to Hono. Regards, Doug