Launched by the Shanghai Chenshan Plant Science Research Center and Chenshan Botanical Garden, the country's first provincial and municipal level digital flora website "Shanghai Digital Flora" officially went online on March 13.
The website will serve as an important modern information network platform for learning about botanical plants. So far, plentiful plant pictures as well as various data have been collected.
For six years, local government, universities and scientific institutions have made great efforts cooperating in the building the biodiversity information platform. The project team spent more than 1,000 days in the countryside and researched 310 regional pieces with 35,737 different specimens and a whopping 169,799 photos collected.
The digital flora website includes 2,979 vascular plants, 844 native plants, 359 invasive plants, 1,776 cultivated plants and many other plant varieties, with plant characteristics and colorful pictures as the site's main contents. The site also contains authoritative checklists, keys and illustrated flora offering information about their Chinese names, scientific names, descriptions and distributions. A search function is available for visitors to look up plant species precisely.
