Flora of Brazil Online: Can Brazil's botanists achieve their 2020 vision?

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide an assessment of the prospects of delivering an online Flora of Brazil by 2020. Our approach is to evaluate the nature and extent of documentation of the Brazilian flora over the past 15 years before exploring whether existing botanical documentation and capacity is sufficient to support the production of a complete Flora over a five-year period. We address the following 'headline' questions: Has a high proportion of Brazilian species been described? Are collection densities sufficient to underpin a national Flora? Is there sufficient botanical expertise available to execute such a big project over a five-year period? Are there current taxonomic treatments that support the development of a national Flora? The results obtained show that the proportion of the flora estimated to have been described is high enough to be confident that those preparing Flora treatments will not be overwhelmed by the numbers of species new to science requiring description; the national average of 1.08 specimens per km2 is significant; relevant taxonomic treatments with a variety of different scopes and geographic scales are available; and, finally the botanical expertise available is demonstrated by the results presented in the List of Species of the Flora of Brasil.