By Tom Weber, KWMU
St. Louis, MO – The Missouri Botanical Garden is getting more federal money to continue its project to update plant databases.
Plant samples from around the world have been recorded electronically for years, but the Garden has been working in recent years to go back and enter data for samples collected before the computer age.
The garden's Bob McGill says this year's $698,000 mostly will pay salaries for people entering the data. "We've got this tremendous wealth of data available and we want to make sure it's used as fully as we can," McGill said.
McGill says one way the database can help researchers is by helping track invasive plant species and tracing those species' origin to a certain port of entry.