Annonaceae for Flora Malesiana - progress or stagnation?

The Annonaceae are the one of the larger tropical woody families that mainly co-dominate the understorey of tropical lowland rainforest in South East Asia. It consists of probably more than 60 genera with about 1000 published species. Recently quite a number of genera have been revised (Mitrephora, Pseuduvaria, Cyathocalyx, Miliusa, Phaeanthus, Goniothalamus p.p., Uvaria p.p.) but unfortunately this has not yet resulted in publishable accounts for Flora Malesiana. Many more local activities are focused on other floras especially of Indonesia and Thailand, one of the reasons being the smaller area within a lower number of species that can be easier tackled by the ever dwindling number of alpha-taxonomists available for such a task. However, there are also positive developments which can help to speed up the progress of writing flora accounts. One is the databasing of specimens in various herbaria. The National Herbarium of the Netherlands, as an example, has finished the data entry of about 18,000 records of Annonaceae in all its three branches. In addition, the author was able to enter more than 1500 collections of Annonaceae from the Paris herbarium and to discover more than 400 type specimens there this year. We hope to find funding to have the same carried out in Kew and the British Museum to also cover some major European herbaria. As these data are or will be available through the homepages of the respective herbaria, the loan of specimens will decrease and time, which is otherwise needed for the administration of the sheets, can be used more productively. Moreover, new methodologies, e.g. molecular DNA analyses techniques that unravel the relationships between genera, helped us to fine tune the borders of some genera and even size down the very large genus Polyalthia to some smaller phylogenetic groups. This paper will present the state of art of the family Annonaceae in South East Asia, and especially for the Malesian region and show some examples of recent developments for the family of the NHN.