Biodiversity informatics and the plant conservation baseline

Primary baseline data on taxonomy and species distribution, and its integration with environmental variables, has a valuable role to play in achieving internationally recognised targets for plant diversity conservation, such as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. The importance of primary baseline data and the role of biodiversity informatics in linking these data to other environmental variables are discussed. The need to maintain digital resources and make them widely accessible is an additional requirement of institutions who already collect and maintain this baseline data. The lack of resources in many species-rich areas to gather these data and make them widely accessible needs to be addressed if the full benefit of biodiversity informatics on plant conservation is to be realised.