Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics
Flora brasiliensis Revisited
From the Flora brasiliensis of Martius to the Flora
Brasiliensis of the 21st Century
Paul E. Berry, Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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My basic premise is that there currently exists a huge body of useful but largely untapped botanical information that could form the basis of a much improved understanding of plant diversity in Brazil and other neotropical countries. While we will need to use the most appropriate modern technical tools to help accomplish this, the real challenge will be in obtaining enough high-quality information from different sources to populate the databases and webpages that will be created. Step one is to take advantage of past successes, and Martius' Flora Brasiliensis represents one of the most massive and concentrated efforts ever undertaken for an area as large and diverse as Brazil. This could at least be a starting point from which people can aim to update and complete the floristic inventory for a particular group, and it needs to be made more accessible to the general public in terms of reusing the beautiful and informative lithographs and making the text searchable in different ways. Images of types and protologues online could also make the historical background upon which much of taxonomy is based much more accessible to the public. A much bigger untapped potential is the information that most active botanists hide in their offices, cabinets, or in their brains, often without any clear intention of publishing the extensive information they have gathered over years of study. We need to tap into this botanical network so as many active botanists as possible will contribute in the short term to a working checklist of all vascular plants (or nonvascular groups and fungi as well) in Brazil. Another very tangible and useful product could be the incorporation of authenticated photographs into an online database. In this scheme, the species would be the fundamental working unit, but these would probably be packaged into larger units such as genera or families, depending on the human resources available for particular groups. An online, illustrated checklist is eminently possible and would form the backbone of a modern Flora Brasiliensis. For such a project to be successful, short-term incremental goals will be essential to guarantee both funding and momentum. I would also argue for a pluralistic approach that would allow botanists to contribute their data in a number of different formats, which would encourage them to contribute to the project and see their data and materials being used in an expedient manner.
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