Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics
Flora brasiliensis Revisited
The "Flora brasiliensis" revisited
George Shepherd, Dept. Botânica, Unicamp
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By any standards, Brazil is probably the most megadiverse country in the
world in almost all major groups of plants and other organisms. The
only complete survey of its Angiosperm flora, the Flora brasiliensis,
was begun more than 160 years ago and took 60 years to complete and
described about 22 thousand species. Current estimates range from 35
to 70 thousand species, reflecting both the vast increase of our
knowledge of this flora and our still profound ignorance of its true
size and extent. National and international needs and obligations
increasingly demand rapid answers to complex questions about the
organisms present, where they occur and their current status. A new
Flora is highly necessary for Brazil, but the magnitude of the task and
the practical difficulties are daunting. Although Brazil now has a
growing contingent of plant taxonomists, they face enormous difficulties
given the sheer size and diversity of the country itself, together with
the poorly known taxonomy of many groups, lack of access to types and
taxonomic literature, inadequate collections, limited facilities and
resources and poorly distributed human resources. Even with
considerable help from taxonomists outside Brazil, a new "Flora
brasiliensis" using current taxonomic practice would require many
decades to complete and it is doubtful if a project with this time scale
could be funded. Two major changes seem necessary : a huge improvement
in taxonomic infrastructure (access to information, types, literature,
herbarium databasing, etc.) and new approaches to the taxonomic process
itself, with a reconsideration of how floras are produced and how they
are used. Both require extensive and ever-increasing use of
informatics. Production of a flora on the scale required for Brazil
offers an enormous challenge for the development of new techniques for
acquiring and integrating taxonomic data while offering an opportunity
to develop innovative ways of presenting taxonomic information to a
wider range of users in a format which meets their requirements and
supplies exactly the information that they need.
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