Inventory of the Plants of Pakistan

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With colleagues Drs. Ali and Qaiser of the University of Karachi, Pakistan, Dr. Peter Hoch is leading a small team of taxonomists in completing the family-level taxonomic treatments for the Flora of Pakistan project, which will cover about 6000 species of flowering plants when finished. This grant will provide treatments for the last four remaining families, the Liliaceae (lilies), Scrophulariaceae (snapdragon family), Rosaceae (rose family), and Asteraceae (sunflower family) with an estimated 900 species in Pakistan. Research will synthesize morphological features and geographical distribution records from thousands of herbarium specimens collected over previous decades, including historically important early collections made by European explorers and housed in European herbaria. The printed flora of Pakistan is now available in over 200 volumes, covering thousands of species. Along with the completion of the printed volumes, the Missouri Botanical Garden is hosting a website with web-accessible versions of the latest taxonomic treatments and is incorporating all the previously published volumes into web-accessible formats, with complementary funding through the USDA. The floristic information provides basic plant distributional information underlying ecological studies in the region, especially important for studies of salinization and desertification, and for tracking the origins of what are now invasive species in the Americas. The completed flora will provide authoritative taxonomic information for a large, biogeographically significant portion of central Asia.