Flora Zambesiaca

This Flora deals with the higher plants of Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Some 10,500 plants will be treated.

This project involves the writing and publishing of a regional Flora (Flora Zambesiaca with around 53 parts) for south-central Africa, covering Botswana, Caprivi Strip, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It started in 1960 and was designed to provide a catalogue of the plant species of the area, a means to identify them using keys, and an indication of distribution. The total Flora is around 10,350 species and around 79% has been published to date. It is intended that the flora will be 86% complete by the end of 2010.

A number of partner institutions have been involved over the years, including national herbaria in the region and institutions in Portugal. In addition, many family treatments have been prepared by past and present Kew staff members.

Since 2000, there have been efforts to increase the accessibility of the information contained in the printed volumes of the African Floras by novel application of xml mark-up techniques to scanned-in texts. Most of the published volumes of Flora Zambesiaca are available as a fully searchable database on the internet. The database retrieves information for any name (accepted or synonym), or allows the compilation of checklists of taxa for geographical divisions of the flora. Advanced features include filtering on habit, habitat, altitudinal range and endemic status. Dichotomous identification keys are included and it is also possible to browse the complete taxonomic hierarchy.