Tropicos is an online
botanical database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
containing taxonomic information on plants, mainly from the
Neotropical realm
The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropics, tropical Ecoregion#Terrestrial, terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperat ...
(
Central, and
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...
). It is maintained by the
Missouri Botanical Garden and was established in 1982. The database contains images and
taxonomical and
bibliographical data on more than 4.2 million
herbarium specimens. In addition, it contains data on over 49,000 scientific publications. The database can be queried in English, French, and Spanish. The oldest records in the database go back to 1703.
Establishment
Tropicos was developed by Garden botanist Dr. Robert Magill in the early 1980s, initially on a tiny Osborne 01 microcomputer. He is currently working as Tropicos’ research staff.
References
External links
*
Online botany databases
Online taxonomy databases
Missouri Botanical Garden
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