{"id":2699,"date":"2016-05-06T16:51:59","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T20:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybg.org\/science-talk\/?p=2699"},"modified":"2016-05-06T16:51:59","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T20:51:59","slug":"wfo-at-nybg-scientists-from-around-the-world-meet-to-advance-work-on-a-comprehensive-online-plant-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/science-talk\/2016\/05\/wfo-at-nybg-scientists-from-around-the-world-meet-to-advance-work-on-a-comprehensive-online-plant-database\/","title":{"rendered":"WFO at NYBG: Scientists From Around the World Meet to Advance Work on a Comprehensive Online Plant Database"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stevenson Swanson<\/a> is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"World<\/a>As if assembling a comprehensive, scientifically verified database of more than 350,000 plant species were not a daunting task to begin with, try doing it in only four years. That\u2019s the ambitious goal the scientists working on World Flora Online<\/a> (WFO) are racing to meet.<\/p>\n

When it\u2019s up and running, WFO will provide scientists, conservationists, political leaders, and other policy-makers with\u00a0information they need to protect one of Earth\u2019s most important resources\u2014its plants.<\/p>\n

More than two dozen of the world\u2019s leading plant scientists gathered at The New York Botanical Garden recently to review the progress that has been made on WFO and to plan the way forward so they can meet the goal of completing the database in 2020, which was established in the Convention on Biological Diversity<\/a>, an international agreement.<\/p>\n

As part of a week-long series of meetings at the Botanical Garden, several of the participants spoke about specific aspects of this monumental project during a symposium on Wednesday, April 27, in the Garden\u2019s Ross Hall.<\/p>\n

The presentations began with introductory remarks by Barbara M. Thiers, Ph.D., the Garden\u2019s Vice President for Science Administration and the Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium<\/a>. She noted that the Garden is one of four leading botanical institutions that are working together to coordinate the efforts of scientists and institutions around the world to create this first-of-its-kind online resource.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Among other things, the Garden is uploading to WFO scientific treatments of thousands of tropical plant species published by the NYBG Press in the Flora Neotropica series<\/a> as well as digitizing and updating existing plant information from other sources. Garden scientists who are specialists in such important plant groups and families as mosses, palms, ferns, legumes, and many types of tropical trees and plants are involved in the work.<\/p>\n

Peter Wyse Jackson, Ph.D., President of the Missouri Botanical Garden<\/a>, which is also a principal partner in WFO, noted that 34 institutions have now signed on as members of the WFO consortium.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat includes all of the key organizations in plant taxonomy and systematics worldwide,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\"World<\/a>\n

Other speakers described the various approaches that are being pursued to bring together a huge amount of vetted data, which until now has been available only in bits and pieces at plant research collections or in individual publications. In some cases, the data has not been available at all.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the case for the flora\u2014the total plant life\u2014of Nepal, a small Himalayan country with an incredibly diverse flora of some 7,000 plant species, according to Mark Watson, Ph.D., head of major floras at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh<\/a>, another of the four lead institutions on WFO.<\/p>\n

\u201cNepal is a global biodiversity hotspot,\u201d he told the symposium\u2019s attendees. \u201cThere really was a knowledge gap. This spurred our interest in working with the Nepalese government to produce a flora.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike most other floras, however, which are published as books, this project is designed to be a \u201cborn digital\u201d flora, which can be easily updated, will be available online, and will be exported to WFO.<\/p>\n

In the case of Brazil\u2014a large country with an almost overwhelming diversity of plant life\u2014researchers there are working to increase ease of access to existing plant information by digitizing as many herbarium specimens of Brazilian plants as possible, including those at such important international collections as the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew<\/a> (the fourth lead institution on WFO), the Natural History Museum<\/a> in Paris, and the Garden\u2019s Steere Herbarium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This collaborative project, called Reflora, has so far made 1.4 million specimens available online, said Eduardo Dalcin, Ph.D., of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden<\/a>. The goal is to complete an online\u00a0virtual\u00a0herbarium and flora for all of Brazil\u2019s plant species by 2020, so they can feed into WFO.<\/p>\n

Similarly, researchers in South Africa\u2014whose 21,000 plant species give it one of the most diverse floras in the world\u2014are compiling an electronic flora from existing, mainly printed sources, said Marianne Le Roux, Ph.D., of the South African National Biodiversity Institute<\/a>. That e-flora will also become a major contribution to WFO.<\/p>\n

All of these projects look at the total plant life within one country. Another approach is to study one family of plants wherever they occur. That is the goal of a project to produce a worldwide study of the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, which includes such important or familiar plants as potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, and petunias.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a huge, complicated family, with as many as 3,000 species. Sorting out the species and producing new scientific descriptions of each has already taken a decade, according to Sandra Knapp of the British Museum of Natural History<\/a>. It too will feed into WFO.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy are we bothering to do all of this?\u201d she said, looking out at the assembled scientists and other members of the audience in Ross Hall. \u201cIt\u2019s to stop the loss of biodiversity. The thing [about WFO] that is going to last the longest is the integration from the global to the local and from the local to the global. The nexus is knowing what plants there are. WFO will make a huge difference to a lot of different people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As if assembling a comprehensive, scientifically verified database of more than 350,000 plant species were not a daunting task to begin with, try doing it in only four years. That\u2019s the ambitious goal the scientists working on World Flora Online (WFO) are racing to meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":2703,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[190,678,670,680,673,672,503,671,674,677,679,675,676,682,681,311,359,531],"yoast_head":"\nWFO at NYBG: Scientists From Around the World Meet to Advance Work on a Comprehensive Online Plant Database - Science Talk Archive<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nybg.org\/blogs\/science-talk\/2016\/05\/wfo-at-nybg-scientists-from-around-the-world-meet-to-advance-work-on-a-comprehensive-online-plant-database\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"WFO at NYBG: Scientists From Around the World Meet to Advance Work on a Comprehensive Online Plant Database - Science Talk Archive\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As if assembling a comprehensive, scientifically verified database of more than 350,000 plant species were not a daunting task to begin with, try doing it in only four years. 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