Welcome to BIEN, the Botanical Information and Ecology Network
BIEN is a network of ecologists, botanists, and computer scientists working together to document global patterns of plant diversity, function and distribution.
Our central goal - To deliver standardized botanical data, geographic range maps, diversity maps, and species lists for all of the plants in the New World. This information will enable us to better understand the determinants of the past and present plant diversity, distributions and abundance. This knowledge is essential for predicting how species, vegetation and agricultural crops will respond to future climate changes.
The BIEN working group is developing a standardized workflow and informatics engine for the integration, access, and discovery of disparate sources of botanical information. The BIEN working group is a conduit for standardizing, integrating others people's data so as to do repeatable Science. Further, the working group is utilizing these standardized data to the create several deliverables including geographic range maps for all species in the New World, an integrated trait database, and a species-level phylogeny for Embryophytes of the New World.
The BIEN website- brings together many types of data needed to address these questions: georeferenced plant observations from herbarium specimens, vegetation inventories, and other sources, species distributions maps, plant traits, and climatic and environmental layers. Our emphasis is on the plants of the New World (North, Central and South America and the Caribbean).
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