A Flora brasiliensis website. How it could look like - an example.
Maria do Carmo E. Amaral & V. Bittrich
Indaiatuba, 24.10.2002
Abstract.
A "Flora brasiliensis website" for providing general access to the accumulated knowledge about the
Flora of Brazil may contain a wide variety of taxonomical or other biological informations and can
be organized in various different ways. The backbone of the website will be the scanned illustrations
of Martius' Flora brasiliensis with updated names. As will be shown, more than half of the names
used in the Flora brasiliensis for the illustrations of a certain family may need to be corrected. This
updating is the first step and needs to be done by one or more specialists for each family. These
specialists should become authors of the respective webpages within the Flora brasiliensis website.
Name updating alone will be very helpful for the numerous users of the Flora brasiliensis. Many
more useful informations, illustrations and photos (of living plants and herbarium specimens) can
and should be added, however, in a step for step process. To give a better idea of the potentialities,
we are preparing a pilot website using the family Clusiaceae and two or three other families as
examples. Such a pilot website should attract comments, criticisms and suggestions from the
systematic community as well as of ecologists and other potential users, allowing for the preparation
of an improved final format. We believe that the combination of illustrations from various sources,
photos, checklists, short taxonomic informations and comments by specialists and possibly
interactive keys, as shown in our example, would facilitate enormously the access of a wide array of
users to a taxonomic knowledge present somewhere but all too often unavailable. It should also
attract the input of the scientific community with corrections and additional informations. Such an
input will be much facilitated by the fact that the website will clearly reveal the countless gaps in
our present knowledge. The informations provided on the website will in several respects help the
taxonomists working on the state Floras of Brazil.
As was explained in the talk by Paul Berry (Madison, Wisconsin), a website about the Flora
brasiliensis should unite informations/knowledge accumulated about the flora of Brasil along the
last two and a half centuries. Information already present either in form of publications or herbarium
specimen often of difficult access, or only in the head of taxonomists. The website should have a
certain emphasis on illustrations and photos. Various recent articles, even in high ranked jounals
like “Nature” or “Science”, that generally are not very interested in our problems, emphasize the
point, that taxonomy is especially apt to enter the “world wide web”. Certainly it meanwhile
dawned to everybody that ecological and biodiversity research in regions with high biodiversity but
low taxonomic knowledge must all too often fail its goals. Mike Hopkins demonstrated in his talk
that the number of still undescribed species in the Amazon might be terribly high. Having little
chance to pursue a new conventional “Flora brasiliensis” in a reasonable amount of time, we should
at least try to collect all information and make it available in the most accessible way for various
kind of users. Combining modern digitalization techniques, data banking and publication of the
informations on the “world wide web” is doubtless a powerful method to reach this goal.
Which informations should be published in this digital Flora brasiliensis and how the
respective website should be constructed is still open to suggestions and discussion. We will show
one possible model for the family Clusiaceae to demonstrate the power of a web-based approach,
but this is by no means final. We explicitly invite suggestions and criticisms to improve this
preliminary model. As Paul Berry pointed out, different taxa will sometimes need different
approaches, and obviously the amount of information available for each family varies considerably.
Backbone for the website are the illustrations of Martius’ original Flora brasiliensis.
Updating the names used there will be the first step and will need the impact of numerous specialists
of seed plant families. Evidently, these specialists will become authors for the respective pages of
the site. The amount of name changes since the publication of the “Flora brasiliensis” can be
considerable: for Cactaceae, Daniela Zappi from Kew sent us a table (Slide 1) showing that more
than half of the names used on the illustrations for this family has changed. It is obvious that
ignorance of the correct names diminuishes the value of the Flora to a large degree. On the other
hand, having the names corrected by specialists will increase the value of the Flora and this can at
the same time be the basis of a check-list of the flora of Brazil.
Now to our model site: The start page (Slide 2) honours the founder of the 19th century
“Flora brasiliensis”, Carl Friedrich Phillip von Martius. From here we enter the page where the
flowering plant families of Brazil are listed (Slide 3). If the user knows to which family he wishes
to go, he clicks directly on the respective family name. If not, he may enter an interactive key
(Slide 4) to identify a specimen down to family or perhaps genus level (the startpage shows a map
with the travel route of Martius and Spix in Brasil.This interactive key is based on the progam
“Lucid” which Kevin Thiele from Australia has demonstrated during this workshop. This family key
still does not exist. Presently we are working with several students on such an interactive family key
for São Paulo state which can later be expanded for other states. Interactive keys can easily be
expanded and corrected and also allow for the direct extraction of descriptions of the taxa.
Knowing to which family to go, clicking on its name in the list will take us to the respective
page, in this case Clusiaceae (Slide 5 e 6). The family page may contain various informations about
the family as well as links to subordinate pages. Here we have a link to the family in Peter Stevens
angiosperm phylogeny website (http://www.mobot.org./MOBOT/research/APweb/) and another one
for the general bibliography about the family. Following a model of Max van Balgooy for the plant
families of the Flora Malesiana, we give here brief informations about characters: those always
present in the family (in Brazil or in the neotropics), those generally present, and those rare and
characteristic for certain genera, and finally similar families and their differences. At the end of this
page we give various informations about the taxonomic situation of the family, incl. a modern
phylogeny. Now to the genera: we have an interactive key (Slide 7) to the genera, links to a page
with photos (Slide 8) and another with illustrations from the Flora brasiliensis (Slide 9) for each
genus and a list of the genera. Probably before taking the trouble of a formal identification, most
people will prefer to browse quickly through the photos and illustrations in the hope to get there in
the easy way. Clicking on the generic name here would take us to the respective genus page,
clicking on the photo directly to the respective species shown on the photo.
If this does not work, the user may enter the interactive key for the genera (Slide 10) of the
Clusiaceae. This kind of key allows freely choosing characters available on the specimen at hand
and leaving it to the program to calculate which taxa combine with the character states chosen.
Characters and taxa can be illustrated by drawings or photos, allowing the use of the key for nontaxonomists, i.e., all those not familiar with our vast morphological terminology. As the website
about the Flora brasiliensis will lay much emphasis on illustrations and photos, these can directly
be used for constructing the key. In contrast to dichotomous keys, the informations about the taxa
accumulated in an interactive key can be extracted directly in form of descriptions, practially a list
of the character states occurring in the respective taxon. This allows easy checking of the states
attributed to the taxon for everybody and thus facilitates suggestions for improvement and
corrections. These descriptions can also be used by all taxonomists for example working on state or
local Floras in Brasil, making it unnecessary to construct a description again and again. As Kevin
Thiele told us, future versions of “Lucid” will allow several users working parallely on different
parts of a web-based key.
If the user knows to which genus he wants to go, he will simply click on the name in the
generic list on the family page. We will go to the genus page of genus Clusia (Slide 11), about
which we have most informations and the best illustrations due to our work on flora biology of
Clusiaceae in the Amazon. As on the family page, the genus page contains brief informations about
the characters of the genus. In an ideal world we would have here a link to a page with photos of all
species and another one taking us to an interactive key. One day we will hopefully get there. In the
real world, we will have most often a list of species names, sometimes nearly complete, sometimes
very incomplete. But it will give us an idea about what we presently know, which is very important
itself. This list for Clusia is more or less complete, besides half a dozen of species known but still
undescribed.
We just show two examples of species pages: Clusia insignis (Slide 12) and Clusia
panapanari (Slide 13). These species pages contain basic taxonomic informations, the illustrations
of the "Flora brasiliensis" (or of other sources), fotos of living plants, informations about the type,
about the distribution of the species, and comments. There are also links to pages showing
herbarium specimens, additional illustrations, the protologue, or formal taxonomic descriptions
We hope these examples give a fair idea of the advantages and potentialities that modern
web-based approaches offer for taxonomy. The biggest advantage is that we can add informations
and make corrections continually, nothing needs to be complete. The website builds up step for step.
We believe that such an approach will give users with very different backgrounds easy access to
informations hitherto not or only with great difficulties available and thus spur botanical research of
various kinds in Brazil and in the neotropics on the whole. Especially the taxonomists working hard
to complete state Floras of Brazil and often suffering under lack of important data will take much
advantage of the informations provided by the website.
In 1968, a memorial plate was erected by Brazil in a street in Munich at the spot where
Martius once lived. The text reads (our translation): Here stood the house in which the great
botanist Carl Friedrich Phillip von Martius, the explorer of the plant world of Brazil, lived in the
years 1833-1868. The land Brazil remembers his activities and work with gratitude. This is certainly
very nice, but who doubts that Martius would feel much better honoured if his great work continued
in his spirit, that is as a large collaborative effort, even knowing that the Flora might be never
completed? A work in progress on an enormous flora that needs to include many specialists and
several institutions from various countries. In 1855, the German Boraginaceae specialists Fresenius
wrote in a letter to Martius (our translation):
“ If I only could recommend suitable collaborators to you! I have certainly tried to
find some, but without success.
The better workers prefer the microscopical-
physiological topics. These people believe that this brings appreciation rather than
systematic studies. We are living in the time of the microscope“.
Substituting “physiological-microscopical”for “macromolecular studies” we are faced with
quite a similar situation today. So we have to work very straight forward using all modern facilities
in an optimal way to succeed. But on the other hand, plant taxonomy has made considerable
progress during the last two or three decades in Brazil. We therefore believe that all neotropical
taxonomists will concur that Brazilian taxonomists in the 21st century are in the happy situation to
play a much more active rôle in a collaborative “Flora brasiliensis” website project than was the
case in the times of Martius.
The "world wide web" was often praised for its democratic (sometimes anarchic) nature. It
seems to us that there is today really no necessity for a demigod-like figure like Martius for editing
the "Flora brasiliensis" website. Rather, a loose group of Brazilian and foreign taxonomists ready to
help should together oversee the progress of the website and decide cases of incertainty. Thus
instead of a Martius 2nd we should have something like a FBWG (Flora brasiliensis working group)
analogical to the APG (angiosperm phylogeny group) collaborating for the progress of our
knowledge about the vast Brazilian flora.