Flora of North America North of Mexico: Phase III

北美植物志(FNA)是由系统植物学家社区开展的一个项目，旨在向广泛的用户和各种媒体提供权威的、最新的信息，关于墨西哥北部北美地区种植外生长的20,000种植物的名称、关系、特征和分布。北美植物群介绍了原始研究产生的知识集合以及对任何先前研究的新考虑，包括最近的实验研究、田野工作、标本馆标本研究和对先前文献的仔细分析。尤其重要的是，在美国、加拿大和格陵兰，通过它们的范围，对分类群的知识进行了独特的整合。许多治疗方法是第一次出现，也可能是唯一一次，这是研究人员S一生对一组植物的研究得出的结果。这些治疗还纳入了最近的研究结果，否则可能在几十年内无法为非专科医生所用。该项目是美国和加拿大植物学家之间的两国合作，得到了美国植物分类学家协会、美国苔藓和地衣学会、加拿大植物协会和美国植物学会的支持。这是唯一一个得到如此认可的研究项目。30个机构投入了大量工作人员的时间和设施来成功完成植物志，美国、加拿大和其他地方的数百名植物学家正在为该项目贡献他们的时间和专业知识。弗洛拉北美公司的具体产品包括14卷印刷品和一张光盘，一个新的关系数据库，各种可上网的信息服务，包括传统的地鼠服务，一个功能齐全的联邦航空局万维网网站，与在线、多媒体出版物的万维网/马赛克接口，以及与联邦航空局S关系数据的符合SQL标准的马赛克接口。这些产品包含有关分类关系、毒性、经济用途和其他生物学重要信息的数据，这些信息从专家那里收到，由项目工作人员和编辑委员会成员编辑，由分类和区域专家审查，并最终以互联网和印刷品的形式交付。从各种来源获得更多和最新的信息，由信息管理委员会进行评估，并将其纳入数据库。北美植物研究所为处理北美植物和植物产品的基础和应用研究提供了一个统一的框架。经过项目工作人员和审查员仔细核实的各种信息可以从统一格式的单一来源获得，来自许多广泛使用的参考文献的不同分类意见被协调并与权威标准相关。植物解剖学家和形态学家、生态学家、植物化学家、进化生物学家和分子生物学家，以及我们的同事分类学家，都需要准确、完整的信息，以便适当地限制他们的研究，选择具有代表性的分类群进行大范围的详细调查，并根据许多群体现有的大量数据来解释他们的结果。数据库中的信息，特别是当与在标本馆标本上发现的精确位置数据相联系时，可以被分析以发现地理分布、与其他生物的共生、遗传关系和形态化学属性之间的相关性。北美植物群为进一步研究提供了丰富的信息宝库。

Flora of North America (FNA) is a project undertaken by the community of systematic botanists to provide authoritative, up-to-date information, to a wide range of users and in a variety of media, on the names, relationships, characteristics, and distributions of the 20,000 species of plants that grow outside of cultivation in North America north of Mexico. Flora of North America presents an assemblage of knowledge resulting from original research as well as a fresh consideration of any previous studies, including recent experimental research, field work, study of herbarium specimens, and careful analysis of previous literature. Particularly important is the unique integration of knowledge of the taxa throug hout their range in the U.S., Canada, and Greenland. Many of the treatments present for the first time, and possibly the only time, knowledge that results form a researcher s lifetime of study of a group of plants. The treatments also incorporate results of recent research that otherwise might not have become available to nonspecilalists for many decades. This project is a binational collaboration between U.S. and Canadian botanists that has been endorsed by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, the Canadian Botanical Association, and the Botanical Society of America. It is the only research program to have been so endorsed. Thirty institutions have committed major staff time and facilities to the successful completion of the Flora, and hundreds of botanists in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere are contribution their time and expertise to the project. Specific products of Flora of North America include fourteen printed volumes and a CD-ROM, a new relational database, a variety of Internet- accessible information services, including traditional gopher services, a full-featured FNA World Wide Web site, WWW/Mosaic interfaces to online, multimedia publications, and an SQL-compliant Mosaic interface to FNA s relational data. these products contain data on taxonomic relationships, toxicity, economic use, and other biologically important information that are received from specialists, edited by project staff and editorial committee members, reviewed by taxonomic and regional specialists, and put into final form for delivery in Internet and in print. Additional and up-dated information is received form a variety of sources, evaluated by the information management committee, and integrated into the database. Flora of North America provides a unified framework for basic and applied research dealing with North American plants and plant products. Diverse kinds of information that have been carefully verified by project staff and reviewers are av ailable form a single source in a uniform format, and differing taxonomic opinions form many widely used references are reconciled and related to an authoritative standard. Plant anatomists and morphologists, ecologists, phytochemists, evolutionary biologists, and molecular biologists in addition to our fellow taxonomists, all need accurate, complete information in order to circumscribe their studies appropriately, to select representative taxa for detailed investigations in large groups, and to interpret their results in relation to the massive body of data now available for many groups. Information in the database, particularly when linked with precise locality data found on herbarium specimens, can be analyzed to discover correlation s among geographical distribution, co-occurrence with other organisms, genetic relationships, and morphological chemical attributes. Flora of North America provides a gold mine of information for further research.