While discussing a few things with someone, it just stuck me that possibly we are the biggest site in the world for wild plants with images ?

I do a lot of searching & have not come across many big sites with images on wild plants.
Most of such sites are specialised ones restricting themselves to some family or genus or to cultivated plants etc.
I think we have more than 2,50,000 images at out links out of which 30,000 to 40,000 have already been inserted.  
And what we are creating now in the form of comparative images at genera pages appears to be a unique work in the world at such a large scale.
Further, if we consider non commercial sites without any advertisements, it certainly is a great feat. Are we number one in this aspect also?
I request members to give more inputs in the matter.


Awaiting any thoughts in the matter, even wild ones although I know we have to go a long way as well as focus on better accuracy of our database.


This post skipped my attention.

I too think eFI must be largest, and one-of-a-kind site – that is, though there are many sites related to botany / taxonomy / etc. I do not find any site that has so much of substance, in terms of pages made per species, the number of pictures illustrated on the page, relevant content from the group / forum regularly getting associated to the site.


It is true, if we add fruit and other identifiable characters to as many as plants it is fantastic 


Don’t get offended if I say it is not the largest, because Chinese Virtual Herbaium has 5,000,000 images but the images also mean images of herbarium specimens. And CVH is ofcourse working under collaboration with around 52 different Universities in China and Taiwan and hence lot of subject experts as well as citizen scientists involved many of whom are paid to do that, although it started at a much lower scale once.

But
That doesnt make our efforts smaller. I must say that we have come a long long way but still we have a long way to go and I am confident that we can one day have atleast a full flora of India represented on our eflora. We are not a google group but a family and our efforts can never be under estimated. As dDinesh sir said, it is really ONE OF ITS KIND where no money is involved, no professional organisation is involved but only our selfless efforts.


Thanks, … Well said. There is nothing to be get offended. It is nice that you have provided some data, which possibly I was aware of as far as herbarium images are concerned- as many organisations are working aggressively in this direction including GBIF, Kew etc.
I just wanted to highlight that we may be one of the biggest in the world in so many aspects & want to explore whether there is some truth to it or not.


As … have pointed out, we may not be largest, as far as the number of associated images is counted. But, we are conceptually very unique in our approach, we can surely boast of being the pioneers in Indian context. We are dealing with plant identifications and taxonomic analysis of flora from all corners of our very large and diverse country, and even we have considerable data across the globe. 

A long way to go, but efloraofindia never stopped. This spirit of moving on will pave way of our great success, and I believe we should not go for comparisons or competitions.


Yes as pointed out by …, there are several other databases larger than us, but mostly managed by renowned institutions. Whenever I am out of station and want to check a plant for herbarium comparison, live images, nomenclature status, I mostly refer to website of Missouri Botanical Garden and its Forefront TROPICOS (4,486,003 specimens, 508,768 images). New York Botanical Garden and Kew Garden have other huge collections of both herbarium images and live plant photographs, to cite a few

    But then ours is a unique group with our leading contributors being members who know very little of formal botanical techniques. We are lucky that … has given a face to our botanical photographs, and happy that most of our contributors here have contributed to Flowers of India also, where any body without botanical knowledge can identify the plants by simple comparison. I hope soon all our plants would be represented there.
    We are all indebted to … for having given us platform to interact and be known not only in India but other parts of the world. I am frequently contacted by people suffering from ailments, when they see photographs of medicinal plants contributed by us on efloraoofindia and/Flowers of India.