The world's largest botanical record, Flora of China, has been published in Beijing.

The 126-volume book describes the 31,142 fascicular plants that have been found in China, with more than 9,000 pictures. It contains historical records, modal characteristics, geographical distribution, habitat and other detailed information.

At a press conference held in Beijing on Thursday by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the primary sponsor of the project, CAS Vice President Chen Zhu said classifying flora is a basic and vital job of taxonomy. The complete database of Chinese plants is significant to global botanists and other scientists, Chen said.

Chen Yiyu, director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), said that compiling such a book required a great deal of research by generations of botanists.

China has the world's third largest reserve of flora, following only Brazil and Indonesia. Since the 1920s, Chinese botanists have collected floral specimens throughout the country.

In 1959, the CAS established the editorial board for Flora of China and published the first volume of the series.

In the past 45 years, 312 botanists from 34 research institutes or universities participated in the giant project. A total 119 of the 126 volumes were published after 1978, when China began its economic reform.

Before Flora of China was completed, the 25-volume Flora of the Soviet Union, which was compiled from 1934 to 1959, was the world's most comprehensive series of its kind, containing more than 10,000 plants.

(Xinhua News Agency April 1, 2005)