Plant Photos

Institute for Systematic Botany

The Institute for Systematic Botany of the Cell Biology, Microbiology, and Molecular Biology Department at the University of South Florida was established in 1990 to promote basic research in plant systematics and to coordinate research, educational and service programs in plant systematics.

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Outside Links

Links to other plant related resources.

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Specimen Search

The USF Herbarium has over 195,000 specimens digitized and we're adding more each day.

Mosses of Central Florida

Guide to the Mosses of Central Florida with an Interactive Key

by Frederick B. Essig

This guide has been prepared as an adjunct to the Atlas of Florida Plants and presently focuses on the common mosses of central Florida. Currently a work in progress—please send corrections and suggestions to Frederick B. Essig at essig@usf.edu.

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Atlas Statistics

View some important indices for this Atlas that are kept up-to-date in real-time.

Atlas Statistics
Statistic Value
Number of Plant Species4,893
Number of Native Species3,317
Number of Non-Native Species1,575
Number of Plant Images19,036
Number of Specimens Digitized240,614

About the Plant Atlas

Florida has over 4,700 species of native or naturalized plants in Florida, including over 4,300 species of vascular plants and over 400 species of bryophytes (plants known only from cultivation are not included). The Atlas of Florida Plants is a joint effort by the Institute for Systematic Botany, the University of South Florida, and the USF Water Institute to provide a comprehensive searchable database of plants in the state of Florida. This website also provides access to the USF Herbarium, which houses more than 300,000 specimens from around the world (about 2/3 of these are databased and available online).

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Browse the Plant Atlas By Map

Select a county below to view plant species for that county. Hover over a county to view the county name.

County Selection Map

How to link to the Plant Atlas

The Plant Atlas has been designed to allow external websites to dynamically link to individual species and issue URL-based searches. This method allows you to link to the Atlas without knowing individual unique species identifiers.

  1. Use the following syntax to link to a species page on the Atlas:
    https://florida.plantatlas.usf.edu/Results.aspx?q=Genus+species
  2. Search for species within a specific family (and link to family page) using this syntax:
    https://florida.plantatlas.usf.edu/Results.aspx?cat=family&text=Orchidaceae
  3. Use the following syntax to search for a specific genus:
    https://florida.plantatlas.usf.edu/Results.aspx?cat=genus&text=Abrus

Click here to see examples »

Search Help

Select the criterion by which you wish to search (Scientific name, Genus, Family, etc.) and enter that information into the provided field.

Hint: Correct spelling is necessary for desired results, but because this function is a string search the full name need not be entered. Any correct part of a taxon name can be entered and a choice of the correct one made from the small list of resulting matches.

For example, matching the full name exactly in a Scientific Name search for Piptochaetium avenacioides may be difficult, but strings of either tium aven or avenaci or m avenac or pipto will all result in very small lists of matches. The intended name can then be chosen from any of those lists. Usually, the last letter (or two) of a given genus, a space, and the first few correct letters of the specific epithet will provide a sufficiently short list containing the desired taxon.

A similar example in a Common Name search is Virginia snakeroot. Searching using "snake root" will yield no results due to the extra space, but searching "snake" will generate a short list of plants with the word "snake" in the common name. Furthermore, a search of "Virginia snake" or even "nia snak" yields one result: Virginia snakeroot.

If, after following the above advice, then difficulties are still encountered please use the "browse" feature.