WASHINGTON, DC.- For centuries, jungle explorers from Europe and North America have created art of the plants they discover—pressing bright flowers and green tendrils onto herbarium sheets for prestigious museums and plant collections. But scientists in the most biodiverse countries lack easy access to this basic information needed to identify plants. The Global Plants Initiative, meeting Jan. 11-13 at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, catapults biodiversity research to a new level, sharing plant collections in a massive online database of high-resolution scans. “In the past, when we wanted to confirm the identity of a plant collected in the field, we shipped samples to experts or travelled to herbaria—both extremely costly and impractical,” said Mireya Correa, staff scientist at STRI and professor of botany at the University of Panama. “New technological advances have put this inform