 Botanist Edward Leonard Caum collected the first specimen on June 17, 1923, and a second was collected by cartographer Charles S. Judd on June 20, 1923.Forest B. H. Brown, botanist of the Bayard Dominick Expedition to the Marquesas Islands (1921–1922), helped provide descriptions and comments for some of the species described by Erling Christophersen and Caum.They named "A. brownii" after Brown in 1931 with the publication of their paper "Vascular plants of the Leeward Islands, Hawaii".