Floristic value of Nee Soon swamp 
63 
or difficult-to-identify taxa that tend to go unnoticed by generalist collectors. While 
they would almost certainly qualify as threatened, a proper nation-wide conservation 
assessment can be made only after targeted search efforts with a broader geographic 
coverage has been carried out. 
Given that most of our collections are sterile, it is possible that some of our 
identifications may be erroneous. The collection numbers of most of the voucher 
specimens of the rediscovered species or new records deposited in the herbaria (see 
Appendix 1) therefore contain the plot numbers so that the respective individuals may 
be revisited for flowers or fruits. All stems > 10 cm DBH within our plots were also 
mapped to positions of 0.5 m resolution so some of the tree species can also be tracked 
down to the individuals we encountered; these maps, the DBH measurements, and the 
geographic coordinates of the plots, are available upon request. 
The floristics presented in Turner et al. (1996a) were based largely on three 
clusters of plots with a total area of 0.6 ha. On the other hand, our study consisted 
of 40 plots sampled across the different elevation zones throughout the Nee Soon 
catchment, and totalled 1.6 ha. Our sampling is more extensive, and less biased than 
past opportunistic botanical collections, and therefore the floristic composition we 
present here is the most representative of the catchment so far—with the caveat that we 
focused more on the forest understorey and trees, and thus may have under-sampled 
canopy lianas (which were incompletely identified due to lack of access to leaves), and 
crown epiphytes. More detailed analyses of soil, hydrology, and the plant communities 
will be presented in future manuscripts. 
In Singapore, the phrase ‘filling of swamps’ is evocative of the city-state’s 
determination to survive at all costs during its early post-independence years, and 
is associated with its industrial and developmental success today. Singapore is not 
unique in its past treatment of swamps; economic growth is a key driver of the loss of 
wetlands worldwide (van Asselen et al., 2013), with two-thirds of the world’s wetlands 
having been lost since 1900 (Davidson, 2014). On the one hand, the recent cache of 
rediscoveries and new records from Singapore’s last substantial tract of freshwater 
swamp forest in the Nee Soon catchment provides some relief that some of this 
natural heritage is safe within a protected area, and hope that more might be found; 
on the other hand, it is sobering to imagine what other biological treasures must have 
been lost when swamp forests such as those at Mandai and Jurong were inundated or 
reclaimed. Going forward, no effort must be spared to ensure that the Nee Soon swamp 
forest will continue to persist, and perhaps some effort should even be made to recreate 
this habitat type elsewhere in Singapore. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. This work was conducted as part of the Nee Soon Swamp Forest 
Biodiversity and Hydrology Baseline Studies—Phase 2 Project funded by the National Parks 
