The botany database: Seed Plants of China (SPCH), and its applications

This paper describes a newly developed botany database named "Seed Plants of China" (SPCH) and its applications. SPCH, the first and the biggest botany database in China, includes both spherical coordinate data and attribute data for a total of 32308 plant species (363 families and 3427 genera). It contains information of all the seed plant taxa (the general designation of the bio-taxonomy units) grouped by county, elevation, and habitat in each province including Taiwan in China. As the only designer of the database, the author first provides a technical description of the database structure, types of geographic and attribute data, data layers, comparison between SPCH and common GIS databases, and its functions and capabilities for serving botanical users. Then, examples of applications of SPCH in areas of botany study are given. Lastly, some future development and improvement on SPCH are proposed.