Peter Raven keynoting at Agents of Change mtg @Smithsonian #NTBG50

World Flora Online overview by @ckmillerjr from the Missouri Botanical Garden #GlobalPlants

World Flora Online how it came to be:
- Starts with conservation
- Series of meetings and MOU (open in 2013)
- 23 signers to the project and growing
- Worldwide participation
- Council and 2 working groups
- Created a logo (most imporant!)

What is World Flora Online?
- all known plants and regions
- freely available over the Internet
- will have a public webiste site and web services
- specialist website
- will ingest printed flora as well ad direct digital treatments
- Content from many other sources

(side note from Chuck: easy to draw the boxes with all the connections on a chart, much harder in real life)

Some questions:
- what about the global plant list?
- WFO backbone will start with IPNI, add a bryophyte identifier
- Some prototype portals have been developed and are in testing
- Uses Darwin Core with extensions
- Created over 100 use cases to develop requirements

Consumers of WFO:
- Conservationists
- Plant taxonomists
- other scientists
- general public interested in botany
- contributors to the WFO
- "other stakeholders"

Upcoming meeting in Geneva (February 2015).

"World Flora Online" Chuck Miller from the Missouri Botanical Garden

My visits to four of the the world's great botanical gardens in the past two months ...

Life as BHL Program Director is not always windowless conference rooms in Natural History museums. Though there are plenty of those (as well as exciting tours through the nooks and crannies of those same museums), in the past few months I've had the great pleasure of seeing four of the world's great botanical gardens (and their libraries). I just missed on a fifth, the Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne) because of a packed schedule, but had see that a few years earlier.

This week I was at the Missouri Botanical Garden (pictures below). It was a very rainy couple of days (with some tornadoes thrown in), some my Garden time was mostly in the Climatron dome!

So, in order of visits, here they are:

Singapore Botanical Garden.
Beautiful location and lovely facilities.



Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Luckily, the rain held off for my visit and I had a great stroll all the way across the garden.



New York Botanical Garden.
My first visit to the NYBG! Had a surprise snowstorm that made the grounds charming.



Missouri Botanical Garden.
Rainy days and thunderstorms, so not much outside strolling.



I should also through in here some pictures of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, the amazing botanical garden in Cape Town, South Africa, that I visited in 2012:



And, some pictures from the Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne) from a 2010 visit:

Red door Trelease House, Missouri Botanical Garden

'Cause you know, we are stardust we are golden and we got to get back to the Garden!

Chuck Miller of @Mobotnews opening #TDWG 2013 in Firenze

Happy birthday, Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, aka "Shaw's Garden" (@mobotnews)

Shaw's Mausoleum

Today is the birthday of Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden. I paid my first visit to "Shaw's Garden" in 2006 (photo set) when I was attending at TDWG meeting before heading on to San Francisco. Since that first visit, I've made many more trips to STL and the Garden (most recently, just a few days ago (photo set).

As a member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Garden has hosted many of our BHL meetings over the year (as well as

Though the Garden is, of course, famed for the beautiful floral and botanical displays, it is also an important scientific facility with an amazing herbarium and research library (The Peter H. Raven Library).

The Garden will be having some special events in honor of it's founders 213th birthday, see more information here.

Some random shots from visits to "MOBOT" (as I continue to think of the Garden) are below. The first item is an herbarium specimen collected by Charles Darwin.

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