About Electronic Flora of South Australia
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The State
Herbarium of South Australia is the foremost authority on the State's
plants, algae and fungi. |
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The
Electronic Flora of South Australia facilitates access to
information traditionally published in semi-popular and technical
handbooks. For a start, the Electronic Flora of South Australia will
provide the contents of the four- volume, 4th edition Flora of South
Australia published in 1986 in the form of species fact sheets. This
is supplemented by a Census of the State's Vascular Plants, which
is now in its 5th edition, a plant species mapper, and access to
identification tools as they become available. |
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Work on a new, 5th edition of the Flora of South Australia is currently
on the way, with several chapters already published on-line.
New and up-dated treatments will be released every 4-6 months.
Information from this new edition will be incorporated into the
eFloraSA fact sheets in the near future. |
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The Electronic Flora of South Australia
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The
Electronic Flora of South Australia aims to provide a
comprehensive Web-projected account of the plants of a large part of the
Australian continent. |
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The advantage of
an electronic flora over traditional hard copy publications lies in the
linkage of its outputs to its growing underlying computerised data
sets.
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- The Plant Distribution
Mapper is linked to data associated with ADHERB, the database of
general collections of the State Herbarium of South Australia
- The Census of South
Australian Plants, Algae and Fungi is linked to FLORA, a
computerised database of plant information, including current
scientific name, previous superseded scientific names (synonyms), and
aspects of the occurrence in the 13 State Herbarium regions of the
State and in other states and countries.
- Plant Identification
Tools. The traditional dichotomous keys are transformed into a Web
facility, with our first examples being a key to South Australian
Acacias and all keys in the out-of-print Flora of South Australia
(1986). Pictorialised interactive keys geared for easier
identification are being developed in participation in national
project, see for example the tool for identifying Solanaceae of Australia.
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These dynamic
links of the Web output of data sets based on herbarium specimens means
that data and information projected can be upgraded on a regular basis,
though, as with the traditional book products, this remains heavily
dependent upon resources. |
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A major project
initiated by the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria is
Australia's Virtual Herbarium, which gives access in the first
instance to the data previously locked away on the specimens held in the
8 principal Australian Government herbaria. |
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The current
Electronic Flora of South Australia: |
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| The State Herbarium of South Australia
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The State
Herbarium of South Australia, housed in the Plant Biodiversity Centre
(the old Tram Barn A on Hackney Road), has since the 1950s been the
focal point of a long tradition of production of books on our flora,
such as the Flora of South Australia, and censuses of plants.
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Other books
available include treatises on Australian marine algae and on South
Australia's macro fungi, on its lichens, its mosses, and in the
flowering plants, its orchids and wattles. There is also a steady flow
of research publications in which important advances in scientific
knowledge of South Australian and Australian plants are documented.
The State herbarium also published the annual Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens,
one of five taxonomic journals issued by Australian herbaria.
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Over one million
specimens are preserved in the State Herbarium collection. The
Herbarium's team of taxonomic botanists and technicians research them to
provide an improved data and information base on the flora.
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The State
Herbarium of South Australia is a joint facility of the Department for
Environment and Water (administered with other scientific branches
within its Science, Monitoring & Knowledge Branch) and the Board of the
Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium. |
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The State
Herbarium and its staff are part of a large cooperative national and
global network of scientific institutes (herbaria and museums) with
scientists working on extensive biological collections with the common
aim of advancing knowledge of regional and global biodiversity. It is a
foundation member of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria which
represents the herbarium collective on national and international issues
and has promoted recent major national initiatives such as the
Australia's Virtual Herbarium and a Consensus Census of
Australian Plants.
(See links page
for more information). |
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The Australian
continent has a rich diversity of plant and animal life. Its makeup is
far from fully known. In South Australia more than 10 new species of
plants are discovered every year through study of the
State Herbarium collections and in cooperation with interstate overseas
botanists. For more information, visit the
State Herbarium web-site, including the
Publications pages.
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| Australia's Virtual
Herbarium |
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Herbaria have
long provided information about plants, algae and fungi. The oldest
Australian herbaria, in Melbourne and Sydney, were founded in the mid
1800s. |
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Australian plant
systematists have produced thousands of authoritative publications on
plants, algae and fungi, including scientific papers and floras and
other semi-popular handbooks founded on the cooperation and extensive
resources of the Australian herbaria. |
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The ease of
computer storage of data and information, and the World Wide Web,
providing sophisticated remote access to these data, are ideally suited
to projecting this important knowledge base to a wider client base.
Organisations and individuals now have unsurpassed opportunity for
accessing these data. The long tradition of cooperation among the
Australian herbaria has been an essential element to the agreement in
the year 2000 to begin providing access to their collective data and
information via an on-line virtual national Herbarium. |
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Australia's
Virtual Herbarium was established by agreement between the
Commonwealth and States Ministers for Environment has established a
funding base, largely from Commonwealth and State components of the
Natural Heritage Trust, but also involving private sources, to complete
the data capture of these specimens. The funds are administered by the
Australia's Virtual Herbarium which has representatives from the
Commonwealth, States and the public. |
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Mapping plant
distribution |
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The Australian herbaria house 6 million herbarium specimens, the
oldest of which were collected on early European voyages of discovery.
Each collection has documentation of the location from which it was
collected. About 80% of the over 6 million specimens and the greater majority
of the "vascular plants" (flowering plants, conifers, and ferns) held in
Australian herbaria have been databased, including over 800,000 of the
estimated one million specimens held in the State Herbarium of South
Australia. |
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Users now, for example, can access any of the early South
Australian collections, many of which are housed in the National
Herbarium of Victoria, as evidence of plant distributions prior to the
extensive land clearance of the past 150 years. |
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In
its first phase of development, Australia’s Virtual Herbarium projects
distribution maps dynamically generated from a single query to a number
of distributed data sets, each belonging to a Government herbarium. The
data is being captured and released plant group by plant group in a
coordinated national programme, as checking is completed. |
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Describing
Australia's plants |
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The Atlas of
Living Australia, incorporating data from Australia’s Virtual Herbarium will deliver
descriptions of the flora dynamically linked to data and information
from across the continent, a distributed on-line Flora. As new
observations are confirmed and recorded in databases, they can be
released without the long delays inherent in traditional hard copy
publication. |
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In the meantime
a number of States and the Commonwealth have put their floras on-line,
for example Western Australia's FloraBase, New South Wales'
PlantNet, the Commonwealth Australian Biological Resources
Study's Flora of Australia On-line, as well as South Australia's
Electronic Flora of Australia. A recent innovation of the Council
of Heads of Australasian Herbaria has been the development of a
Consensus Census of Australian Plants, which will be developed
for the vascular plants in 2005 and 2006 in a collaborative venture by
the Australian Herbaria. This project will facilitate the integration of
knowledge embedded within these floras.
(See links page
for more information). |
