Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2013, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (2): 174-183.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1259.2013.00174

Previous Articles     Next Articles

Online Flora: Method and Practice of E-taxonomy

Lisong Wang*, Yong Yang, Xianchun Zhang   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China
  • Received:2012-05-22 Revised:2012-10-11 Online:2013-03-01 Published:2013-04-07
  • Contact: Lisong Wang

Abstract: Global change, environmental pollution, over-exploitation, biological invasion, and habitat loss threaten living species of the world. The primary concern of taxonomy is to discover, document, and recognize species before they disappear on the earth. The public, government, and scientific community all have strong knowledge requirements of taxonomy. However, taxonomy is not adequate to fulfill these needs, because of misunderstandings by the scientific community and public, unscientific methods in evaluating scholar contributions by taxonomists, decline in number of professional taxonomists, and outdated ways of knowledge management and publication. In this paper, we consider the implementation of a web-based taxonomy community network, featured by maximum coverage of taxonomic work flow, integration of existing online resources, keeping coordinate among individual researcher, organizations and projects, and finally realize of Online Flora, will partially solve the dilemmas faced by current taxonomic research, improve its environment of knowledge production and reuse, enhance its competition in a changing science and technology landscape, make it becoming a 21 century science.