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.
