The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of the Environment and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) have launched the “Anthos” programme, an information system for plants in Spain. The Secretary General for Territory and Biodiversity and President of the Board of Trustees of the Biodiversity Foundation, Antonio Serrano, and the director of the project and research professor at the Spanish National Research Council, Santiago Castroviejo, today announced this pioneering initiative in Spain that was born as a result of the agreement signed between the Biodiversity Foundation and the CSIC.

The “Anthos” program, which means flower in Greek, initially grew under the umbrella of the Iberian Flora project, also directed by the Royal Botanical Garden (CSIC). This initiative allows citizens to easily and freely access the most complete botanical information in Spain through the internet, and aims to consolidate itself as the main electronic tool in our country for professionals, technicians and fans of the natural environment.

The website offers www.anthos.es, with more than 1,000,000 records, thematic information on nearly 11,000 plants in Spain. This page allows you to make queries about families, genders, vernacular names, geographical searches, and images. Thus, for each species, which can be accessed by both its scientific and vernacular names, the distribution map, the list of synonyms, drawings, photographs, the number of chromosomes, or the list of citations made by the different authors are shown.

On the other hand, this system allows the visualization of various layers of the geographical distribution maps of each of the selected plants at the desired scale, as well as comparing the distribution of different species by superimposing their corresponding layers, or superimposing these with those corresponding to climatic, geological, or edaphic data, which facilitates the search for distribution patterns. The raw data can also be downloaded freely, in electronic format, for various studies.

The importance of the Anthos programme’s plant biodiversity data model has served as a reference for other research teams trying to apply this model to other biological groups or spatial data structures within the framework of the European INSPIRE Directive, which ensures that information about natural resources and that can be freely accessed through the web, and whose transposition by the Member States is expected for the year 2008.