New Reflora webpage brings together systems, indicators, and news on Brazil's flora and funga

The Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden launches the new Reflora – Systems and Indicators on Brazilian Flora and Funga webpage, created to bring together, in a single environment, information, indicators, tools, and outreach content related to the Flora and Funga of Brazil and Reflora Virtual Herbarium systems.

The new webpage serves as a gateway to the main resources of the Reflora Program, facilitating access to its systems, databases, indicators on Brazilian biodiversity, and information produced by the extensive network of specialists who continuously contribute to advancing knowledge of the country’s flora and funga. In addition to organizing and making this information more accessible, the webpage also brings together computational tools and a dedicated space for science communication.

Computational Tools for Taxonomy

One of the main new features of the webpage is a section dedicated to computational tools developed to support the work of taxonomists and biodiversity researchers in Brazil. These tools were created to facilitate different stages of working with taxonomic and botanical collection data, from efficient access to and retrieval of information from the Flora and Funga of Brazil and the Reflora Virtual Herbarium, to data processing, organization, and analysis, as well as the preparation of taxonomic products.

The tools featured include the R packages floraR, fungaR, refloraR, jabotR, aRboretum, catalogoUCsBR, monographaR and barRoso, as well as the new cronoflora system. These resources were developed to expand opportunities for programmatic access, automation, analysis, and reproducible use of data from the Reflora systems.

The new webpage therefore seeks to bring Reflora’s data infrastructure even closer to efficient, transparent, and reproducible workflows for taxonomic, floristic, and biodiversity research.

A New Space for Communicating Brazilian Taxonomy

This News section is itself another new feature of the webpage. It is intended to serve as a permanent channel for communicating the activities developed by the network of specialists associated with the Flora and Funga of Brazil.

Contributing taxonomists are invited to share news, discoveries, and initiatives of interest to the community. Has a new species of Brazilian flora or funga been published? Has a taxonomic revision provided new insights into a particular group? Is there a new project, publication, course, conference, field expedition, or other relevant initiative in botany, mycology, phycology, or related fields? We want all of this to have a place here as well!

The aim is to bring taxonomists, managers, research institutions, and society closer to the knowledge that is continuously being built about Brazil’s flora and funga.

The new Reflora webpage expands the ways in which knowledge produced by its network of collaborators and by the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden can be accessed, used, and communicated, reinforcing a commitment to open science, collaboration, reproducibility, and the documentation of Brazil’s extraordinary diversity of plants, algae, and fungi.

Welcome to the new Reflora webpage!