This virtual flora was created to serve as a gateway for the environmental research community as well as the general public to access and contribute to a growing collection of specimen records and observations. These data represent the products of contemporary field research as well as historic data mined from publications and historic records.

Sky Island Alliance's MABA project is a visionary initiative to catalog, protect, and restore one of the world's premier biodiversity hotspots - the Southwestern U.S. and Northwestern Mexico’s Madrean Sky Island region (Sonora, Arizona, Chihuahua, and New Mexico). Over the next few years we will inventory the wildlands and wildlife of these Sky Islands — a region of incredible biological wealth — while implementing community-based conservation, restoration and education activities that are key to the integrity of natural and human environments.

This is more than just a website - it is a virtual natural history resource that allows access to a distributed network of departments, museums and agencies that provide environmental information. Symbiota web tools strive to integrate biological community knowledge and data in order to synthesize a network of databases and tools that will increase our overall environmental comprehension.

Development of this and several other specimen databases have been supported by National Science Foundation Grants (BDI 9983132, BRC 0237418, BDI 0743827)

To learn more about the features available through this site, visit the Symbiota Help Pages where you will find a listing of several online Flash Tutorials as well as text instructions. Join us as a regular visitor and please send your feedback to nick@skyislandalliance.org

This project was initiated by Sky Island Alliance, with invaluable support from the Symbiota project, and made financially possible by Veolia Environment Foundation.