Vascular Plant Inventory and Mapping of Buck Island Buck Island Reef National Monument St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Ray, Gary; South Florida/Caribbean Network

This report documents a terrestrial vascular flora of Buck Island, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and it describes a digital mapping of the island’s plant communities in order to track ecological change following the eradication of its large and destructive arboreal rat (Rattus ratus) population in 2000. The success of that eradication program has been well established by National Park Service resource managers with repeated trapping efforts subsequent to its completion. Numerical abundance data collected during this study, when organized spatially, can greatly facilitate land management, including exotic plant control or removal, rare plant conservation and restoration, long-term community monitoring and associated wildlife protection projects. As our project began in June 2001, signs of vegetation recovery were everywhere in evidence. Trees consisting entirely of branches that had been severely pruned by gnawing of rats in recent years were beginning to form more natural, umbrella-shaped canopies. Plentiful fruit providing a diet for native birds and bats was maturing on the branches, and even falling to the ground to set the stage for seedling recruitment and regeneration became plentiful. Successful nesting of seabirds, shorebirds, and birds from wetlands and upland habitats substantiated our impressions. Future research and management efforts can build on these benchmark data, expanding upon our botanical focus to encompass the entirety of the biota and its ecology.