Arkansas Floristic Site--announcement

[Monique D. Reed]

A new WWW-based diversity/distribution mapping system for the vascular
flora of Arkansas is available at:

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/arkansas/

This allows mapped visualization of county record summaries for
vascular plant families, genera, and species that include
infraspecific taxa via color coding by county.  While, with current
data, the result often reflects collecting intensity, 'diversity maps'
of some taxa (Polypodiaceae vs. Taxodiaceae) show concordance with
Arkansas landforms (see also Juglandaceae and Crowley's Ridge
counties).  The system also provides distributions for individual
taxa, county-level listings from a family diversity map, full
state-level family checklists, and full vascular plant checklists by
county (links from Table 2).  All listed output carries links to
either diversity or distribution maps.

This experimental system is the result of on-going collaboration among
faculty and students at the University of Arkansas Herbarium, the
Biota of North America Program, and the Texas A&M Bioinformatics
Working Group. Further development of this, and similar systems under
construction, will be enhanced by input from potential users of
biodiversity data and comments from TAXACOM users would be useful.  Of
special interest is the potential for qualified or registered users of
this type of system to add county records represented by specimens in
local herbaria.  Since all maps are generated 'on the fly', it should
be possible to expand base data via 'real time', on-line interactions.
 Would specimen holdings from national herbaria provide a significant
contribution to data currently at hand for the Arkansas flora?  If so,
would curators be willing or able to 'register' as data providers and
add county records via form-based entry?

Also, recent additions to the 'Flowering Plant Gateway' at:

http://www.isc.tamu.edu/FLORA/cronang.htm

include family-level links to Biota of North America Program
synonymized checklist pages with distribution mapping for Texas taxa
and Cronquist family synonymy pages from the Indices Nominum
Supragenericorum Plantarum Project.

Hugh Wilson
Biology (845-3354)
wilson at bio.tamu.edu
http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~hugh/homepage.html

Let virtue distinguish the brave.