"Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK. We are living in an age where biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with the well-documented problems of habitat destruction being compounded by the largely unknown future effects of Climate Change. High quality, accurate and reliable biodiversity data are needed by biologists, conservationists and environmental modellers to understand and assess the ecosystems in which they work, to produce effective conservation strategies, and to feed computer-generated models which predict what environments and habitats we might face"

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / M.F. Watson, C.H.C. Lyal and C.A. Pendry -- Part I. The widening audience. Floras yesterday, today and tomorrow / A.G. Miller, M. Hall, M.F. Watson, S.G. Knees, C.A. Pendry and M.R. Pullan ; Current uses and future perspectives for conservation biology / B. Collen ; The present and future value of floras for functional ecologists / J. Dick, R. Smith and R. Wadsworth ; A publisher's perspective : making biodiversity information available and relevant to a wide audience / J.B. Connor -- Part II. The products of descriptive taxonomy. Lessons learned from two projects, the Fauna Europaea and the Checklist delle specie della fauna italiana / A. Minelli ; Flora Europaea and Euro+Med / S.L. Jury ; Increasing the utility of the regional African floras / D.W. Kirkup, P. Malcolm and A. Paton ; Cybertruffle : an online resource for mycology / D.W. Minter ; Zooplankton identification manual for North European seas (ZIMNES) / L.C. Hastie, J. Rasmussen, M.V. Angel, G.A. Boxshall, S.J. Chambers, D.V.P. Conway, S. Fielding, A. Ingvarsdottir, A.W.G. John, S.J. Hay, S.P. Milligan, A.L. Mulford, G.J. Pierce, M. Shaw and M. Wootton -- Part III. Outputs and impact : field guides and applications. A field guide to the dragonflies and damselflies of Britain and Ireland / S.J. Brooks ; Sangha trees : an identification and training guide to the trees of the northern Republic of Congo / A.H. Wortley and D.J. Harris ; Millennium Seed Bank collector guides / D. Hopkins ; Training in tropical plant identification / D.J. Harris, S. Bridgewater and J.-M. Moutsambotâe ; Field identification of vectors and pathogens of military significance / A.G. Gutierrez -- Part IV. The influence of technology on data gathering in the field. The changing role of collections and field research / S. Knapp ; Field methods for inventorying insects / C.L. Hèauser and K. Riede ; From seabed to World Wide Web : an overview of marine zoological sampling, data processing and potential production of digital marine faunas / A.L. Allcock ; Advancements in electronic data capture for botanical field research in temperate regions / M.F. Watson, A.G. Miller, M.R. Pullan, C.A. Pendry and S.G. Knees -- Part V. New technologies : their current use and future potential. Extending floras and faunas to include users' views / A.L. Weitzman and C.H.C. Lyal ; Taxa, taxon names and globally unique identifiers in perspective / R. Hyam ; E-publishing descriptive taxonomy : the convergence of taxonomic journals and databases / V.S. Smith ; DNA barcoding in floral and faunal research / S.E. Miller.

"Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK. We are living in an age where biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with the well-documented problems of habitat destruction being compounded by the largely unknown future effects of Climate Change. High quality, accurate and reliable biodiversity data are needed by biologists, conservationists and environmental modellers to understand and assess the ecosystems in which they work, to produce effective conservation strategies, and to feed computer-generated models which predict what environments and habitats we might face"--