Flora

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Flora is all the plant life of a region or a certain time, usually the native plants that grow there naturally. The term is related to fauna (animals) and funga (fungi). Sometimes bacteria and fungi are also called flora, for example gut flora or skin flora in specific contexts. The word comes from Flora, the Roman goddess of plants and flowers, and it started in the 16th century to mean the vegetation of an area, then a book that lists that vegetation. In the 17th century it was also used to mean the flowers of an artificial garden.

A key idea is that vegetation is how a place looks, while flora is which plant species are present. This distinction was first described by Jules Thurmann in 1849. Floras are grouped by region, time period, special environment, or climate, and they can also cover fossil flora—the plant life of past eras. A flora is usually a book, but today you might find it on a CD, in a database, or on a website.

Early examples include Simon Paulli's Flora Danica (1648), describing medicinal plants in Denmark, and Michał Boym's Flora Sinensis, which covers parts of China and India and also includes some animals. Many floras include diagnostic keys to help identify plants, often using a two-step choice called a dichotomous key. Floras can be technical and may require some botany knowledge to use effectively.