Flora of China

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FLORA OF CHINAThe Flora of China (FOC) is a collaborative international project to publish the first English-language treatment of the approximately 30,000 species of vascular plants of China, or about 12% of the world's total. All accounts of FOC are jointly co-authored by non-Chinese (mostly American and European) and Chinese scientists. To date, the FOC project has published seven of the 25 text volumes and four of the 25 illustration volumes. All accounts are downloadable as pdf files and ASCII-delimited text files. The FOC websites at Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china and Missouri Botanical Garden http://www.mobot.org/research/asia.html (MBG) provide dynamic links to distribution maps, illustrations, and other relevant data such as botanical names, bibliographic citations, altitudinal ranges, synonyms, and species status (endemic, native, cultivated, or naturalized). The project has eleven centers: HUH, California Academy of Sciences, Smithsonian Insti-tution, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Paris), MBG (the coordination center), and the institutes of botany in Beijing, Kunming, Nanjing, and Guangzhou. These institutions complement each other in their excellent libraries and rich collections of Chinese plants and, they exchange material and literature during work on the FOC accounts. The major results expected during this two-year award include the publication of four text volumes treating 44 families and 4,560 (or about 15% of the entire flora). These include important species of food, horticultural, medicinal, and timber values, especially members of the buttercup, rose, orchid, mulberry, and elm families. Work on additional volumes will also be at various stages of editing or near completion, especially on members of the large and taxonomically difficult rhododendron, palm, carrot, and sedge families. In addition, at least three illustration volumes will be published, and the images of the scanned illustrations and finalized legends will be placed on the web and linked to the descriptions and checklist data. Because FOC is the first up-to-date, English-language account on the plants of China, the information included will be of tremendous value to horticulturists, conservationist, botanists, and scientists in related fields. Study of the FOC is important for understanding modern floristic affinities between North America and eastern Asia because species of many genera are found only in these two areas. The fragmentation of China's vegetation makes it all the more important to have accurate, up-to-date information. Consistent efforts will be made during the course of the FOC project to identify threatened and endangered species and those that have not been collected recently. The information included in FOC is extremely important for the proper management of the plant resources of China and for solutions that address environmental issues.