Flora of the Hawaiian Islands
Introduction
Prologue | Site Development | Information Sources |
Our goal is to provide a flexible query tool to access information on Hawaiian vascular plants from a taxonomic or geographical perspective at a variety of levels of detail. Queries can result in a simple checklist with island distribution to information on names, types, identifying characteristics, and images (illustrations and photographs). Currently, the available databases can supply checklists of Hawaiian flora and type information for names based on Hawaiian collections. The present checklist database consists of 160 families, 832 genera, and 2,499 taxa of flowering plants and 27 families, 69 genera, and 222 taxa of ferns and related groups.
Work is still underway to verify type collection records and publication information for all scientific names. Currently information is available for each name, some records are verified and others are not. The site has also been enhanced by adding over 31,000 specimen records from collections in the United States National Herbarium, synonyms for naturalized plants, images for many species, descriptions, and a bibliography of publications on Hawaiian plants.
Our long-term goal is to expand the scope of our flora project and eventually provide the Internet community with the most complete reference on the flora of oceanic islands of the Pacific Basin.
Site development
The Hawaiian flora online presentation was conceptualized by the joint efforts of Warren L. Wagner, Ellen Farr, and Sylvia Stone Orli. Sylvia Stone Orli developed the Web site. Data is maintained by Warren L. Wagner. Jessica Braun has been preparing photographic images of plant taxa for web presentation and has helped to maintain the image database. Robynn Shannon contributed to the initial database development and maintenance of checklist and nomenclature information. Nancy Khan and Tim Flynn contribute to data-gathering and verification of information.
Information Sources
Data from the research programs of Warren L. Wagner, Smithsonian Institution, Derral R. Herbst, Bishop Museum, and David H. Lorence, National Tropical Botanical Garden, along with their evaluation of research publications, is analyzed and compiled into the databases used for this site. The primary source of information for flowering plants is the Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai`i by Warren L. Wagner, Derral R. Herbst, and S. H. Sohmer (revised edition 1999), and for ferns and related groups is Hawai`i's Ferns and Fern Allies by Daniel D. Palmer (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). An electronic version of the supplement to the Manual is also provided that tracks differences between the Manual and the Web site databases.
Click on these links for more information about the electronic supplement or to obtain your own copies of the Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai`i and Hawai`i's Ferns and Fern Allies.
[ TOP ]
