Nggafa

The Essence

"Areca mandacanii is a solitary lowland palm known only from a single patch of forest on the Bird's Head (Vogelkop) Peninsula of Indonesian West Papua, in northwestern New Guinea. Charlie Danny Heatubun described it in 2008 from material he and his colleagues collected in February 2003 during a field trip for the Palms of New Guinea project, and it remains extraordinarily poorly collected: GBIF holds only six occurrence records worldwide, nearly all of them Kew herbarium material from that one locality. The palm reaches about 15 m, with a well-defined crownshaft and a crown of eight pinnate leaves whose single-fold leaflets are gathered into groups held in several planes. The protologue likens the resulting plumose effect to the Australian foxtail palm, and it is quite unlike the broad, several-fold leaflets arranged in a single plane in the cultivated betel nut, Areca catechu. Its fruits are large, 65-70 mm long, ripening from dark green to golden yellow or light orange. Local people use the stem for flooring in their houses and chew the seed as a substitute for betel nut, and they usually fell the whole tree to harvest the fruit. Heatubun saw potential in the species both as a nut crop and as an ornamental, noting that the fruit size, aroma and colour would interest palm growers. The IUCN Red List assesses it as Critically Endangered: a single known location, with oil palm plantations and coal mining planned nearby, and no plants in ex situ collections."

Published in 2008 in Palms 52(4): 199, in the paper 'A New Areca from Western New Guinea' (pp. 198-202), from a collection made in February 2003 during the Palms of New Guinea project. The name is accepted by POWO, World Flora Online and GBIF with no synonyms, and the protologue places the species in subgenus Areca, section Oeotheanthe (sensu Furtado), alongside the cultivated betel nut A. catechu. Heatubun and colleagues treated it again in their 2012 monograph of the East Malesian betel nut palms (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 168: 147-173). The IUCN Red List assessment is by R.N. Zulkarnaen, carried out on 14 December 2020 and published in 2025: Critically Endangered under criteria B1ab(v)+2ab(v), with extent of occurrence and area of occupancy both given as 4 km2 and a single known location.