It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of botanical exploration, taxonomic and, more recently, phylogenetic research throughout the world. The adoption of an updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2011 provided the essential impetus for the development of the World Flora Online (WFO) project. The project represents an international, coordinated effort by the botanical community to achieve GSPC Target 1, an electronic Flora of all plants. It will be a first-ever unique and authoritative global source of information on the world's plant diversity, compiled, curated, moderated and updated by an expert and specialist-based community (Taxonomic Expert Networks-"TENs"covering a taxonomic group such as family or order) and actively managed by those who have compiled and contributed the data it includes. Full credit and acknowledgement will be given to the original sources, allowing users to refer back to the primary data. A strength of the project is that it is led and endorsed by a global consortium of more than 40 leading botanical institutions worldwide. A first milestone for producing the World Flora Online is to be accomplished by the end of 2020, but the WFO Consortium is committed to continuing the WFO programme beyond 2020 when it will develop its full impact as the authoritative source of information on the world's plant biodiversity.

Cassava flour (CF), a cost-effective source of starch, was employed as a substrate for successful acetonebutanol-ethanol (ABE) production by batch-fermentation with Clostridium beijerinckii. The effect of temperature, initial concentration of CF and chemical/enzymatic hydrolysis were studied in a 2 3 factorial design. Results revealed that temperature and initial concentration of substrate exert a significant effect on ABE production, as well as interactions of temperature with the other variables. Solvent production was maximized when working at 40°C, 60 g l -1 CF and enzymatic pretreatment. An average of 31.38 g l -1 ABE was produced after 96 h, with a productivity of 0.33 g l -1 h -1 . A posterior randomized block design (3 9 2) showed that enzymatic hydrolysis (with saccharification periods of 6 h at 60°C) enhances both reducing sugar and solvent production if compared to chemical pretreatments. Average ABE production in this case was 27.28 g l -1 , with a productivity of 0.28 g l -1 h -1 . Results suggest that CF may be a suitable substrate for industrial ABE production.

Abstract. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the world's largest digital library of biodiversity literature. Currently containing almost 40 million pages, the library can be explored with a search interface employing keyword-matching, which unfortunately fails to address issues brought about by ambiguity. Helping alleviate these issues are tools that automatically attach semantic metadata to documents, e.g., biodiversity concept recognisers. However, gold standard, semantically annotated textual corpora are critical for the development of these advanced tools. In the biodiversity domain, such corpora are almost non-existent especially since the construction of semantically annotated resources is typically a timeconsuming and laborious process. Aiming to accelerate the development of a corpus of biodiversity documents, we propose a text mining framework that hastens curation through an iterative feedback-loop process of (1) manual annotation, and (2) training and application of statistical concept recognition models. Even after only a few iterations, our curators were observed to have spent less time and effort on annotation.

The World Flora Online (WFO) project was initiated in 2012 in response to Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation – "To create an online flora of all known plants by 2020" (CBD 2010, Wyse Jackson 2013). A WFO Consortium of 50 international institutions and growing has been formed (see Wyse Jackson and Miller (2015) for a historical overview). The World Flora Online Public Portal (www.worldfloraonline.org) was relaunched in July, 2022. It is populated with a taxonomic backbone of plant taxonomic data, which integrates the International Plant Name Index (IPNI), World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP, Govaerts et al. 2022), Tropicos, Angiosperm Phylogeny Group IV (A.P.G. 2016), Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group (Schüttpelz 2016) and others supplemented, inter alia, by the Global Compositae Checklist and Solanaceae Source. The WFO taxonomic backbone aims at covering all “effectively published” (Turland 2018) plant names that are in use or found in taxonomic literature and to integrate them into a modern phylogeny-based system of classification (Borsch et al. 2020). To facilitate the ongoing curation of the WFO backbone, identifiers, called WFO-IDs, have been created for 1.4 million names, including both vascular and non-vascular plants. WFO IDs are also cross-referenced to IPNI and WCVP identifiers as well as to the name IDs used in the source databases. WFO is updating the taxonomic backbone by engagement of new plant Taxonomic Expert Networks (TENs) focused on selected plant groups (for an example see Korotkova, this symposium), thus contributing to a transparent and inclusive reorganisation of the taxonomic research community. WFO also includes by now over 600,000 “content” data items gathered from digital floras and monographs, and other sources like International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) threat assessments and the Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) Global Tree Assessment. Content data can be text descriptions, images, geographic distributions, identification keys, phylogenetic trees, as well as atomized trait data like threat status, lifeform or habitat of a taxon. Over 30 digital descriptive datasets have been received from sources such as Flora of Brazil, Flora of South Africa, Flora of China, Flora of North America, Flora of Thailand and many others. WFO aims at clearly showing the original sources to give credit to the authors, both for backbone and content data. Extensive work is required to match the names associated with the submitted descriptions to the names and WFO-IDs in the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone and then merging the descriptive data elements into the WFO Portal. Numerous techniques have been adopted and created to accomplish the data cleaning, standardization and transformation required before descriptive data can be integrated. Among the new tools created is a system called Rhakhis developed at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (Hyam et al. 2022). Rhakhis is used to manage the WFO taxonomic backbone data including ingestion, editing and export and includes APIs to access the versioned backbone data. This presentation will focus on the current state and plans for the future of the World Flora Online.