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The Flora of the Philippines Project

Category: Articles
Date Posted: 2005-12-28

The Flora of the Philippines is a major biodiversity documentation project of the Philippines National Herbarium. It started in October 1991 as a collaboration project between PNH and American botanical institution such as Bishop Museum in Hawaii and later, Botanical research Institute of Texas (BRIT) in Fort Worth, Texas.

The project is divided into 3 subprojects: Plants Inventory, Collections Management and writing and Documentation.

The First subproject, the Philippines Plants Inventory Project, was supported by the US National Science Foundation and the US Agency for International Development from October 1991 to October 1998. It involved intensive collection of plant specimens throughout the country with priority on botanically rich and critical areas and entailed processing of plant collection and distribution to major herbaria for identification and exchange of specimens. Tree teams composed of tree members each scoured the forest around the country for plants on a duration of 20 to 30 days all years around. Specimens were collected in 10 duplicates and these were distributed to PNH, National History Museum at Los Banos, Smithsonian institution, Harvard University Herbarium, Bishop Museum, BRIT, Rijksherbarium in The Netherlands, Kew Herbarium in U.K., Bogor Herbarium in Indonesia and Singapore Herbarium. The project also established biodiversity monitoring plots in Mt. Kitanglad, Bukidnon and Mt. Guiting-guiting National Park in Sibuyan.

The second sub-project, the Collections Management Project, was funded by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from October 1991 to February 1996. It dealt with the processing of backlog specimens, rehabilitation and maintenance of the collection the herbarium and data basing of the processed collections. About 30,000 backlog specimens were processed,80,000 specimens in the general collections rehabilitated and 5,000 PPIP specimens processed. Collection data of these specimens and type specimens were entered into a data base. The third sub-project, the Writing and Documentation Project, involves research , documentation and actual writing of the flora. This is to be done by local and foreign taxonomists who are specialists in the different plant group. Up to the present, however, this phase has not been started due to lack of funding. However, the PNH intends to continue working on this project and eventually prepare a flora for the Philippines.