Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics

Flora brasiliensis Revisited The Need for a Neotropical Plant Species Checklist William Wayt Thomas (wthomas@nybg.org), The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY 10458-5126, EUA

Available information on the vast majority of Neotropical plant species is too scant and unreliable to be useful in developing precise conservation priorities. Also, characterizing accurately the flora of a specified area (i.e., country, state, or municipality) is difficult for most areas of Latin America. For a limited area, we can compile a reasonably complete checklist with distributional data from a few herbaria. No one institution, however, has a collection diverse enough to provide data listing all tropical American plant species, or their complete distributions. To compile such a list, we must design a means by which we can pool data from many sources.

A complete checklist can be viewed as comprising two kinds of data: those data that pertain to the plant name, such as type information, synonymy, illustrations, and data that pertain to specimens of that species, especially locality information. The species-level data must be compiled from existing floras or checklists which must be made consistent, and species not treated in an existing source must be included. Constructing a distributional checklist compiled from various sources is a rapid and relatively simple way to begin and requires that all contributors be willing and able to provide data in a common format. Thus, the more data fields required, the more difficult it is for potential contributors to provide complete data. On the other hand, the more data provided, the more useful the data becomes. It is critical, therefore, that we understand what questions we need to ask, and what data fields will be needed to provide answers to those questions

Organization: Depto. Botânica, Instituto de Biologia, Unicamp Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental Sponsorship:

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