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Leguminosae of Myanmar

The diverse and largely intact flora of Myanmar has been overlooked for decades. To begin addressing this knowledge gap, a collaborative project funded by US National Science Foundation between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), New York Botanic Garden (NYBG), Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Myanmar Forest Department is producing the first specimen-based checklist (a list of species known to exist in a particular geographical area) of the highly diverse Northern Forest Complex (NFC) in the Hkakaborazi-Hponganrazi landscape, Myanmar. A botanical checklist important step towards producing the Flora of Myanmar (an in-depth publication describing all the plants that exist in Myanmar).

Since 2017 staff from NYBG and RBGE volunteers have been helping us to digitise our vascular plant herbarium specimens from Myanmar. We need your help to unlock the data they hold for use by the researchers involved in this project. The digitised specimens will be georeferenced and made available on an online data portal. Pulling this information together in an online portal will make it possible to create the checklist. Specimen data will also provide the baseline information required to make planning decisions affecting the NFC ecosystem, and facilitate broad scale analyses of plant diversity patterns within Southeast Asia.

In this expedition to Myanmar we will be exploring the Leguminosae, are one of the largest families of flowering plants, it contains many economically important species including pulses and beans.