On October 10, the news that the Cataloging of the Flora of the Iberian peninsula and the Balearic Islands has just been completed was published in the Science & Tech section of “El País”.
In the project, started in 1982, 255 authors from 72 institutions from 14 different countries have participated and 27 Spanish and seven Portuguese universities have collaborated.
Spain was one of the few European countries that still did not have an exhaustive cataloging of its plants and in 1982 flora specialists were still using as a reference the Prodromus Florae Hispanicae, a book in Latin by the German Willkomm and the Danish Johan Martin Christian Lange. published a hundred years earlier.
The 6,120 species of Iberian plants include almost half of all the plants in Europe, which reflects the true dimension of the work that has just been completed, however, so far there have been no celebrations, no presentations, not even official announcements.
The 25 volumes of the work can be consulted and downloaded in pdf format from the digital library of the Royal Botanical Garden.
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