The launch of the Flora Uruguaya Online marks a milestone for understanding the country's plant biodiversity, as the last attempt to catalog all its vascular plants was completed in 1911. This free online platform, accessible at florauruguaya.org, compiles information on 3,112 plant species. The project is the result of the decades-long work of researchers like Mauricio Bonifacino, Victoria Valtierra, and Ary Mailhos, who are dedicated guardians of the Faculty of Agronomy's herbarium. They emphasize that creating a comprehensive flora is a cyclopean task that is not adequately incentivized by the modern scientific system, which values rapid article publication over long-term, foundational work. The Flora Uruguaya Online project integrates data from the nation's main herbaria and the citizen science platform NaturalistaUY, providing the scientific community and the public with complete and reliable access to national botanical knowledge.
"If you ignore the names of things, what you know of them also disappears," stated Carl Linnaeus in 1755, underscoring the importance of taxonomy. In an era of acute biodiversity loss, this principle is more critical than ever: you cannot protect what you do not know. While the platform is fully operational, it is still a work in progress, with a significant portion of the collections yet to be digitized. Nevertheless, Flora Uruguaya Online is a powerful tool for conservation, research, and environmental management that brings well-deserved recognition to the labor of generations of botanists.
