The Flora of North America Project: A 21st-Century Tool for Managing Plant Information

Abstract

O NE of the most urgent global issues is preservation of biodiversity. Establishing a baseline for such an effort should include: determining what species exist, how they are related to other species, where they live, how their distributions are expanding or receding, and which are endangered. For the plant species of the United States and Canada, the most up-to-date compilation of such information will be provided by the of North America North of Mexico (FNA), the official name of the project. The plant life of this continent is remarkably rich and diverse, with about 20,000 species of plants in the area north of Mexico alone. Of the native genera, 3817o are found only in North America, and an additional 18% are found only in the Western Hemisphere. The of North America is the first comprehensive description of all plants growing spontaneously in this area. The project, a collaborative, bi-national effort of more than 30 major botanical institutions in the United States and Canada, draws on the expertise of botanists around the world to write and review treatments. The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis serves as the organizational center for the project. The 30 volumes of the of North America are to be published over about 15 years, with the first two volumes published in 1993. The of North America is the first project compiled on a database as well as books, making it easier to compile the information as well as making it available electronically. (See the section on the On-Line Resources.) For the only other Floras of similar scope, Europaea and USSR, the publications were compiled with no equivalent database. (The capitalized word Flora is used when referring to a publication; the lowercase flora refers to the plants in an area.)