From Plant Press, Vol. 3, No. 2, April 2000.
Members of the Department once again traveled to Southeast Asia to continue our collaboration with the Myanmar Forest Department on a new list of the plants of that country. Deborah Bell and Ida Lopez concentrated their efforts on an inventory of the specimens in the only two existing herbaria in the country, at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) in Yezin and at the University of Yangon. They worked in close association with Daw Yin Yin Kyi at FRI and U Myo Khin at the university to initiate the specimen inventory. The plant inventory system developed by Christian Tuccinardi and Ellen Farr was installed on the computer systems of those herbaria and the first segment of the collections including all of the monocots and a few selected dicot families were entered into the system. These inventoried records will now be compared to our recently completed revision of the monocot checklist for Myanmar. Once the collections at the two herbaria are fully inventoried, the data will constitute the most extensive documentation ever assembled of the plants of Myanmar.
At the same time W. John Kress and Michael Bordelon continued their efforts on field collections in Myanmar by travelling to Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park and Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary on the west side of the Irrawaddy River. Although the end of the dry season limited the number of taxa in flower, they found some very interesting and rarely collected species. While Deborah and Ida celebrated the famed Burmese Water Festival in Yezin, John and Michael experienced the first rains of the season as they hiked through the foothills of the Chin Mountains and Rakhine Yoma.
New to the Department's Web site is the "Botanical Exploration in Myanmar Project." This site offers a comprehensive checklist of the flowering plants of Myanmar. The checklist data include taxonomic names, distribution records, and where available, habit descriptors and common names. At the Web site you can display a checklist and distribution data for names in a family, display a list of monocot families represented in the checklist, and display a list of checklist names for a family. You can also search by state or division name to see a list of plants known to occur in that region. The current focus of the project is on the monocotyledons and will continue with the rest of the flowering plants and gymnosperms in the near future. Visit the Myanmar Project at <http://persoon.si.edu/myanmar/>.
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