Abstract
Regional floras are primary resources for plant identification, an essential step in developing conservation strategies. They also provide students with a scientific window on the plants around them and help them learn botanical terminology, but they are expensive to maintain and publish. We are developing web-accessible updates for different floras, as part of which we are using online resources to help us work more effectively while rapidly providing richer resources. We use Key Base for sharing dichotomous keys, linking the terminal taxa to subsidiary keys or descriptive taxon pages. Taxon pages are generated in OpenHerbarium which enables integrating specimen and observation data with descriptions, line drawings, and images and displaying maps based on georeferenced specimen data. Its nomenclatural backbone is easily modified to reflect new treatment and can also handle multiple taxonomies. We are examining is the possibility of using a Wikipedia approach to provide a glossary.
Highlights
Learning to use a regional flora moves an individual from reliance on knowing someone to ask to increasing independence and becoming someone with the ability to build on what is known, contribute to the knowledge of plant species and their distributions, and becoming a person to whom others turn
We look at ways KeyBase and OpenHerbarium can help in developing rich floristic resources for a region by mobilizing and adding to what is known, enhancing or replacing posted information as more is learned
OpenHerbarium was established for herbaria in the Old World, for countries without an existing herbarium network, but it is sharing information developed for the grass volumes of the Flora of North America north of Mexico project [14, 15]
Summary
They enable mapping the distribution of plant diversity, a key step to understanding ecosystems at multiple scales and development of conservation plans. They are important educational tools, familiarizing students with the plants around them, the characteristics of different genera and families, and botanical terminology. We look at ways KeyBase and OpenHerbarium can help in developing rich floristic resources for a region by mobilizing and adding to what is known, enhancing or replacing posted information as more is learned
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