XVI International Botanical Congess

In conjunction with CONABIO (Mex. Natl. Comm. for Understanding & Use of Biodiversity), the Plant Resources Center (PRC) at UT Austin has begun a two-year project to catalogue the estimated 80,000 Mexican Asteraceae stored in its collections (LL, TEX). The MSAccess-based program BIOTICA is being used to record complete specimen, label and locality data, georeferencing and scanned images. The database currently contains data for 25,000 specimens. The compiled data and resulting emergent information from this project is already being used to identify endangered species, target areas for conservation and evaluate urban development plans. The data from this project will be fully accessible on the World Wide Web both through the PRC homepage and REMIB (Mexican Network of Biodiversity Information).