Botanical Garden Gets $3 Million Grant For Online Database | Business

The Missouri Botanical Garden has received a generous three-year, $3 million gift from Monsanto Company to support its work on the development of World Flora Online.

The World Flora is an international collaborative effort involving the leading botanical institutions worldwide to develop the first-ever comprehensive, authoritative and accessible online resource for the world’s approximately 400,000 known plant species.

The World Flora Online will improve access, analysis and management of critical botanical information for policy makers and planners, biodiversity conservation practitioners, botanists, ecologists, geneticists, other scientists and users of plant data worldwide.

The support of Monsanto Company will fund the Missouri Botanical Garden’s contributions to this ambitious endeavor from 2012 to 2015.

The project will include the building of an open-access web-based system for data collection and a subsequent web portal for the display, query and export of this data for scientific and governmental research and conservation.

Upon completion of a first phase of the project, it is anticipated that data on some 100,000 plant species, including names, descriptions, geographical distributions and conservation status, will be available with open access to users around the globe.