Oral Paper

         Biodiversity Informatics & Herbarium Digitization

Introducing www.plantsofhawaii.org: A species information and identification system for the Flora of Hawaii

Presenting Author
Timothy Gallaher
Description
Our new webiste, Plants of Hawaii (www.plantsofhawaii.org), brings together information about all native, naturalized, and cultivated plants in our state. The site will include descriptions of every plant taxon, specimen and field images, cultivation and cultural information, and maps indicating the known distribution for each species. The site is constantly updated as new information about our flora becomes available. Ongoing projects will extend the site's scope to include information on bryophytes and algae so that all of our flora, from the mountains to the ocean, are represented. The site serves natural resource managers and biosecurity programs by providing critical information so that potentially harmful species can be prevented from entering the islands, established noxious weeds can be tracked, and native species can be restored into natural areas.  The site is easy to use and searchable using binomial and vernacular names. We hope the site will be a valuable resource for the general public. We further hope that anyone interested in or currently working on the flora of Hawaiʻi will help us improve the site by providing field images, editing descriptions, or contributing other data.