Publishing Digital Floras and Faunas (12 Feb 2004)

Usability Views Article Details

Publishing Digital Floras and Faunas (12 Feb 2004)
The word flora refers to both the plants that live in a particular region and a publication that describes those plants, as fauna is both the animals of a region and a publication that describes them. There is a worldwide effort to create natural history publications to help document the known species, in the face of major loss of habitat and extinctions. Some of the most visible projects include The Flora of North America, the Flora of China and the Flora of Australia. Jointly, the ultimate objective of these efforts is to produce a Flora of Earth. Similar efforts are underway for insects, but the number of insects far outnumbers plants. The huge potential size of floras and faunas is just one of many challenges to traditional methods for authoring, publishing and using them. Standing in a forest in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, how many of the species in front of you would you expect to find in your field guide? And what if you were in any tropical region on earth?

Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Dec-03/heidorn2.html

Read 104 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title.

Next Article: The Name Is Not the Terrain

This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy