Corresponding author: Miguel Porto (
Academic editor: Pavel Stoev
The Flora-On dataset currently includes 253,310 occurrence records for the class
The Flora-On project aims to compile and make publicly accessible chorological, ecological, morphological and photographic information for the entire vascular flora of Portugal. The project’s website offers powerful query and visualization capabilities, of which we highlight the probabilistic bioclimatic and phenological queries which operate based on the empirical density distributions of species in those variables.
Flora-On was created and continues to be maintained by volunteers who are Associate members of Sociedade Portuguesa de Botânica (Botanical Society of Portugal). Given its focus on research-grade and current data, the Flora-On project represents a significant contribution to the knowledge of the present distribution and status of the Portuguese flora.
Pereira AJ, Francisco A, Porto M (2016) Flora-On: Occurrence data of the vascular flora of mainland Portugal. PhytoKeys 69: 105–119. doi:
Carapeto A., Porto M., Araújo P.V., Clamote F., Lourenço J., Pereira A.J., Almeida J.D., Holyoak D.T., Pereira P., Portela-Pereira E., Silva A., Aguiar C., Henriques T.M., Gomes C.T., Silveira P., Schwarzer U., Caraça R., Chozas S., Canha P., Covelo F., Marabuto E., Farminhão J., Ribeiro S., Cardoso P., Peixoto M., Guiomar N., Rosa-Pinto J.M., Jacinto V., Engels H., Silva V., Clemente A., Silva C. et al. (2016). Flora-On: Interactive Flora of Portugal. Sociedade Portuguesa de Botânica. Online:
Flora-On, Interactive Flora of Portugal
Miguel Porto (Programmer)
The project does not have direct funding from any source, the platform being entirely built and maintained by volunteers. Maintenance costs of the web server are covered by the Associate membership fees of Sociedade Portuguesa de Botânica (Botanical Society of Portugal). However, externally funded projects have contributed through the provision of data.
Portugal is located at the south westernmost extent of Europe (Figure
Location of mainland Portugal (black) which, together with Spain (dark grey), forms the Iberian Peninsula. Dashed line represents the boundary of the Mediterranean macrobioclimate, which contacts with the temperate macrobioclimate to the north.
The orography of Portugal is heterogeneous, particularly from north to south, with the Mountains and Plains of the Iberian northwest and of the Iberian Central System dominating the northern parts of its territory (
Across mainland Portugal the vegetation is mainly Mediterranean in terms of both its structure and floristic composition. Semi-deciduous and perennial oak woodlands, “montado”, shrublands, grasslands and silvo-agricultural systems occupy most of this area. Mainland Portugal supports approximately 2,900 native vascular plant taxa (
The Flora-On project aims to compile and make publicly accessible chorological, ecological, morphological and photographic information of the entire vascular flora of Portugal. Occurrence data is regularly uploaded to the website by active collaborators, typically on a weekly basis, and consists of geo-referenced data points of species (or infraspecific taxa) along with their date of observation and phenological state. Additionally, other research projects contributed data to the project from their exhaustive sampling campaigns. An open-source version of the platform is currently under development and can be found at
The strength of the Flora-On platform lies in its ability to execute a diversity of query types (Table
Internal structure, data flow and front-end interfaces of Flora-On. Pink boxes represent the front-end interfaces that interact with the user (input and/or output). Green boxes represent the data, either permanent or temporary (dashed box). Blue boxes represent the internal server-side algorithms that parse the user queries, process and summarise the raw data, and deliver the results to the front-end interfaces.
Example of query types which can be entered by users into the Flora-On search box. Any comma-separated combination of queries can be entered into the search box. Currently, Flora-On only accepts queries in Portuguese. The table provides the English translation in parentheses.
Type of query | Example queries (meaning) | Returns |
---|---|---|
Morphological | arbusto espinhoso, flores amarelas |
All taxa that present the specified attribute combination |
Bioclimatic range | continentalidade>14 |
All taxa whose cumulative density distribution in each variable, within the specified ranges, is greater than a given threshold |
tempminima: 1.4-3.7, precipitação: 1300–1900 (minimum temperature between 1.4 and 3.7°C and annual precipitation between 1,300 and 1,900 mm) | ||
Bioclimatic similarity | tempmaxima~ |
All taxa whose density distribution of the observations in the specified variable is similar to that of the specified species, given a threshold of similarity |
Geographical variable ranges | altitude<100, costa>100000 |
All taxa whose cumulative density distribution in each variable, within the specified ranges, is greater than a given threshold |
Geographical themes | Algarve (existing within Algarve region) | All taxa with at least one observation within the boundaries of the specified region, natural park, county, |
NC06 (existing in NC06 |
||
Geographical proximity | perto: |
Taxa having at least one observation within a given radius from the specified coordinate |
Geographical similarity | distribuição~ |
Taxa with a distribution similar to that of |
Phenological range | 20 julho a 9 agosto |
All taxa whose cumulative density distribution of flowering dates within the specified range is greater than a given threshold, i.e., taxa whose flowering period is concentrated within the specified range |
Phenological similarity | floração~ |
All taxa whose density distribution of flowering dates is similar to that of |
Phenological precise date | 7 fevereiro |
All taxa which may be found in flower at the given date (regardless of the flowering distribution throughout the year) |
Area of occupancy | quadriculas<3 |
All taxa that occur only in less than three 10×10 km |
Flora-On is designed in such a way that the results of any type of query, irrespective of its complexity, can be visualized across different facets, evidencing aggregated bioclimatic, geographical, phenological or morphological features of the species that match the query. All queries can be expressed through plain text, but to simplify the querying process for general users, four front-end graphical query interfaces are provided to aid query building (Figure
The standard search displays the species photographs ordered by different criteria;
The bioclimatic explorer displays jointly the occurrences of the species that match the query in a bioclimatic/environmental space, with the possibility of overlaying multiple queries in the same plots, evidencing the ecological differences between species or groups of species (
The WebGIS displays (with the ability to download the output) the map of the number of species that match the query per Universal Transverse Mercator
The multi-way interactive identification key allows users to identify species by iteratively narrowing down possible species, freely choosing its way through a set of characters. Displayed characters are adjusted for each iteration according to the list of possible species, and are highlighted according to their discriminant power, to enhance the efficiency of the identification process (
The joint flowering profile displays the aggregated flowering profile of all species matching the query, e.g. flowering profile of the species occurring in areas with an annual precipitation above 1,500 mm (currently accessible through the standard search results).
IPT:
GBIF:
Website:
The Flora-On dataset includes 253,310 occurrence records of the class
In total, this dataset includes occurrence records for 150 plant families and 2073 taxa (Figure
Tree map of the Flora-On dataset based on a two-level taxonomic classification. Families are delineated with thick lines and genera with thin lines. The size of the rectangles is proportional to the number of records held. The plot was built with the R package ‘treemap’ (
Kingdom:
Phylum:
Class:
Order:
Family:
Common names: Vascular plants
The Flora-On dataset covers almost the entire territory of mainland Portugal, although there remains a significant lack of information for some areas, particularly in the central and southern interior regions (Figure
Number of occurrences (
The number of Portuguese endemic species recorded per
Number of Portuguese (
36°43'12"N and 42°10'12"N Latitude; 9°37'12"W and 6°9'36"W Longitude
Although the bulk of the dataset corresponds to observations made between 1 January 1995 and 2 February 2016 (Figure
Barplot depicting the number of occurrence records observed per year. Occurrences observed before 1990 (127) were omitted for clarity. 7,681 records are not dated.
Flora-On: Interactive Flora of Portugal
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For each occurrence, GPS coordinates are recorded by the collaborators wherever possible; otherwise approximate coordinates and their level of precision are recorded. Plants are identified at least to species level. Thereafter, collaborators upload the data to the Flora-On database via a webmapping interface or by uploading a record table. Coordinates are then generalised to the
Taxon nomenclature is fully controlled via use of a reference checklist, allowing neither spelling errors nor outdated synonyms. The reference checklist includes only currently accepted nomenclature which corresponds to an updated version of the “Checklist da Flora de Portugal (Continental, Açores e Madeira)” (
The responsibility of species identification rests with the collaborators, most of which have expertise in plant identification. Additionally, the Editorial Board of Flora-On is committed to ensure a high reliability of uploaded data, hence checking regularly for unlikely or doubtful occurrence records, and asking collaborators to provide pictures, descriptions or specimens whenever needed. The Editorial Board estimates at least 95% of the records to be correctly identified under the most up-to-date nomenclature.
The current Flora-On dataset published through GBIF includes occurrence and phenological data. Phenological data, for now, is limited to a ‘Yes’/’NA’ field in respect of flowering, and is linked to the date of the observation. In addition, Flora-On also utilises a morphological dataset not currently published elsewhere, as well as a number of other quantitative data fields that numerically describe the flowering period, bioclimatic and altitudinal distribution profiles of each taxon (Figure
Morphological data is a compilation of information from different bibliographic sources (
Species altitude profiles and bioclimatic profiles are estimated by applying a kernel density on elevation and bioclimatic data, i.e. the set of elevation and bioclimatic variable values at which each taxon was observed. Elevation data is extracted by crossing taxa occurrence data with the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (METI, NASA). Bioclimatic data are extracted from the climatic variables and bioclimatic indices compiled and developed by Monteiro-Henriques et al. (2015).
The Flora-On dataset represents a major contribution to the knowledge of the present distribution of Portuguese and Iberian flora. Despite the lack of information in several parts of the territory, Flora-On dataset constitutes the most complete and up to date source of research-grade occurrence data on the Portuguese flora, since a great concern is put on ensuring the correctness of the data. Other existing nation-wide platforms covering occurrence data of the Portuguese flora have either a partial coverage or do not specifically target validated data. Furthermore, previous data on the Portuguese flora was limited to herbarium and bibliographic sources, which are largely not digitally accessible or accessible only in a very coarse format.
Finally, the Flora-On project has been stimulating the collection of new data on the distribution of species, which has resulted in great improvements in the knowledge of many species. Indeed, the voluntary field work conducted by the collaborators has significantly improved the knowledge about the current status of many rare, protected by national and international legislation, or hardly known species, and several new species not known to occur in Portugal have been recently found.
We thank all the collaborators of the Flora-On project who have voluntarily contributed with occurrence data, photographs and content, and those external projects who provided additional data arising from their fieldwork. The full list of collaborators and projects can be found at