Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics
Flora brasiliensis Revisited
A Flora brasiliensis website. How it could look like - an example
Maria do Carmo E. Amaral & V. Bittrich
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A "Flora brasiliensis website" for providing general access to the
accumulated knowledge about the Flora of Brazil may contain a wide
variety of taxonomic or other biological information and can be
organized in various different ways. The backbone of the website will be
the scanned illustrations of Martius' Flora brasiliensis with updated
names. As will be shown, more than half of the names used in the Flora
brasiliensis for the illustrations of a certain family may need to be
corrected. This updating is the first step and needs to be done by one
or more specialists for each family. These specialists should become
authors of the respective web pages within the Flora brasiliensis
website. Name updating alone will be very helpful for the numerous users
of the Flora brasiliensis. Many more useful information, such as
illustrations and photos (of living plants and herbarium specimens) can
and should be added, however, in a step by step process. To give a
better idea of the potentialities, a pilot website is being prepared
using the family Clusiaceae and two or three other families as examples.
Such a pilot website should attract comments, criticisms and suggestions
from the systematic community as well as of ecologists and other
potential users, allowing for the preparation of an improved final
format. We believe that the combination of illustrations from various
sources, photos, checklists, short taxonomic information and comments by
specialists and possibly interactive keys, as shown in our example,
would facilitate enormously the access of a wide array of users to a
taxonomic knowledge present somewhere but all too often unavailable. It
should also attract the input of the scientific community with
corrections and additional information. Such an input will be much
facilitated by the fact that the website will clearly reveal the
countless gaps in our present knowledge.
webmaster@cria.org.br