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Florabase 3

GENERAL

Welcome to the new Florabase!

It’s hard to imagine, but Florabase is now over 22 years old (22 years 7 months), close to a quarter century providing essential botanical information to the community. Despite its age, Florabase remains popular; our analytics show the site received 10.3M page views in the last 3 years, from over 635,000 users.

But it is clearly time for a fresh look, and a new project team comprising Ben Richardson, John Huisman, Shelley James, Terry Macfarlane, Cheryl Parker, Julia Percy-Bower, Kelly Shepherd, Julian Tonti-Filippini, and Juliet Wege has got together over the last few months and proposed and reviewed potential upgrades, regularly tweaking the look and contents in test versions of the new Florabase.

The new Florabase 3 is a substantial upgrade that reflects the status of Herbarium-focussed projects and paves the way for several important future updates. Some of the more significant improvements are:

  1. The entire interface has been overhauled to make it more accessible and readable on smartphones and tablets.
  2. Our maps are now Javascript-based and clicking on a pin representing one of our specimen records will now take you to that record.
  3. The Interim Biogeographical Regionalisation for Australia version 7 is implemented. This changes the short codes for some regions and adds the Indian Tropical Islands region.
  4. Our “News" and “Plant of the Month” features have been combined into a new section we’re calling “In Focus”.
  5. Our Help pages and other supporting documents have been tidied up and combined into a revised Help section.
  6. We have extended our “Advanced Search” feature to permit queries of the WACensus Supra Code, including the value “Angiosperms”, which represents both the “Monocotyledons” and “Dicotyledons”.
  7. Our “Search Names” feature is available at the top of every page for quick taxon name-based searches. This now permits Species Code searches, e.g. BANATT for Banksia attenuata.

Browser Support

You may continue to use Florabase with any browser you wish, but the site now uses features only available in the following browser versions. Note that Microsoft Explorer is no longer supported at all.

  • Microsoft Edge 18 or newer
  • Mozilla Firefox 60 or newer
  • Google Chrome 64 or newer
  • Apple macOS and iOS Safari 12 or newer
  • Android 6 or newer

Our analytics tell us that most of you are already using far newer versions than those listed.

Further Notes

Where is the map button in the search result screen?

Our revised maps are part of the taxon profile page and a separate map display is not needed. A button on each map allows it to be displayed full screen for easier use.