Online access to the plants of the world is available
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 13:05
in Biology & Nature
For centuries, jungle explorers from Europe and North America have created art of the plants they discoverpressing bright flowers and green tendrils onto herbarium sheets for prestigious museums and plant collections. But scientists in the most biodiverse countries lack easy access to this basic information needed to identify plants. The Global Plants Initiative, meeting Jan. 11-13 at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, catapults biodiversity research to a new level, sharing plant collections in a massive online database of high-resolution scans.