Thirty years with Flora Croatica database

Nikolić


• • T h i r t y y e a r s w i t h F l o r a C r o a t i c a d a t a b a s e P R I L O Z I P O Z N A V A N J U F L O R E H R V A T S K E | C O N T R I B U T I O N S T O T H E K N O W L E D G E O F T H E C R O A T I A N F L O R A Introduction
The monitoring and analysis of biodiversity requires the use of large amounts of different data. Most often it is data related to taxonomy and nomenclature and data on the distribution of individual taxonomic units, although the total spectrum of required data is incomparably wider.
IT tools in processing biodiversity data was therefore natural and fast. The statement "The impacts of electronic data processing in the various fields of taxonomy and systematic ..., come to be looked upon, in retrospect, as one of the most curious episodes in the history of biology" (Heywood 1984) nowadays seems to be true.  (Berendsohn 1997). Since the beginnings of this dynamic field (reviews for instance Crovello & MacDonald 1974, Jury 1991, Ball-Damerow et al. 2019, tire bioinformatics has today "become a major growth industry almost in its own right" (Sugden & Pennisi 2000).
As highlighted in Ball-Damerow et al. (2019), online databases with detailed information on organism occurrences collectively contain well over one billion records, and the numbers continue to grow. The digitization of natural history specimens (Beaman et al. 2012) and development of online platforms for citizen science (Sullivan et al. 2014) have driven a steady accumulation of records on the occurrence of species over the last decade. For example of this growth is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which has grown from just over 200 million records in 2010 to over 1.08 billion records today, a more than fivefold increase. The number of national and regional databases is really large, as is the number of global pooling initiatives into super systems.
On the local scene, i.e. for the territory of the Republic of Croatia, this global trend has its own copy, at least when it comes to vascular flora, as the main component of total biodiversity. Flora Croatica Database (FCD) is a national database with a thirty-year tradition (Nikolić 2005-onwards).
Since its beginnings and local application, the FCD

Purposes
The original FCD purposes are defined when designing the project and have remained the same to this day. Based on the activities carried out, these are: • profession: (1) area of nature protection and biodiversity, (2) spatial planning, (3) environmental impact studies, (4) legislation, (5) monitoring of changes (monitoring), (6) maintenance of natural history collections, (7) fulfilment of international obligations, (8) implementation of projects and (9) other; • science: an indispensable source of data in scientific research, in particular flora, biogeography, and ecology, but also other disciplines of the wider field of botany. Measurable is the application of FCD in the implementation of domestic and international scientific projects, as well as in the preparation of graduate papers, and master's and doctoral dissertations; • education: application in the implementation of curricula especially of higher education institutions, but also during secondary school education; • popularization: of national flora and biodiversity on a wide platform, both on the domestic and international scene. The copyrights on the data are diverse:

Copyrights
• individuals use FCD as a resource to store, process and publish their own original data. • Legal entities use FCD as a resource to store, process and publish their own original data: • public data is all data whose collection is finan-

R E H R V A T S K E | C O N T R I B U T I O N S T O T H E K N O W L E D G E O F T H E C R O A T I A N F L O R A
In botanical terms, the first need to store and process a larger amount of data has arisen from the monographic processing of the genus Thalictrum (Ranunculaceae). This work has generated an abundance of scientific names within the genus at national and regional levels with a number of necessary accompanying attributes (synonyms, authorization, bibliography, photo documentation, etc.). The first conceptually amateur gender database was created in dBase IV, then converted to Access v2.0 for Microsoft Windows v3.1.
However, in the early 1990s, a parallel initiative began on the development of the Index Florae Croaticae by the group of authors, which was then successively published (Nikolić 1994(Nikolić , 1997(Nikolić , 2000. A manifold larger amount of collected data and the need for its almost daily use and updating inevitably led to a combination with previous experience in working with databases. The idea of processing the national vascular flora with a specialized database is formalized by a project financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology -Biological Database and GIS (1993 -1996), and its eponymous continuation (1996 -1999). These

International cooperation
From the beginning, there was international collaboration, which greatly accelerated the initial development of FCD.  1995), which was used after the publisher's approval.
The genera names were checked out by comparing with Names in Current Use in digital version (Greuter et al. 1993, by courtesy of the author) and with family and genera list from digital version of Flora Europaea Database, which is part of the PANDORA taxonomic database system at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (by courtesy of R. Pankhurst).
The data on the authors of scientific names is stored according to Brummitt & Powell (1992)

Structure and modules
Several scientific contributions have been published on the original concept and interior architecture of FCD (Fertalj et al. 2000a, Nikolić et al. 2001, Milašinović et al. 2013, expert contributions  and congress announcements (Fertalj et al. 2000b, Mihelj et al. 2007, Milašinović et al. 2012, so these contents will not be repeated here. In addition to the numerous modifications that occurred after these publications ( Index Florae Croaticae (Nikolić 1994(Nikolić , 1997(Nikolić , 2000, which in the later period was continuously upgra-  Families. Module in which DELTA system is integrated (Dallwitz et al. 1993(Dallwitz et al. , 1999(Dallwitz et al. , 2000 and which enables (1)

c a d a t a b a s e P R I L O Z I P O Z N A V A N J U F L O R E H R V A T S K E | C O N T R I B U T I O N S T O T H E K N O W L E D G E O F T H E C R O A T I A N F L O R A Data
The current data status of the main FCD items at the time of writing this manuscript (November 2020) is shown in Fig. 1a. It is interesting that of almost one million recorded findings, the largest share of 57% belongs to the original field observations, which is particularly significant because they are more recent data, compared to 37% of the findings originating in the literature that are mostly older than a few decades (Fig. 1b). Despite the more or less continuous digitization of herbarium material, the share of geocoded findings from the collections is only 5%, with the emphasis that it is potentially a vast pool of very valuable data still awaiting evaluation. It is a segment that needs increased attention in the coming period. As regards the number of species that have been geocoded, their share given the data source is equal (Fig. 1c).

Dynamics
Beside the summary of the current cumulative state of individual data types in the FCD, the question is what is the dynamics of their accumulation?

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What is the use intensity of the FCD and its content and how much data is required and used? Since 2004, FCD has been fully internet-oriented, and the targeted monitoring of access to websites will provide an answer to these questions.  indicating the persuasiveness of use (Fig. 3b). For example, the annual dynamics for 2019 indicate that weekly activity is concentrated on working days, with the increased use of the pre-summer period and a decline in the summer period. It is important to point out that FCD reaches 100 -350 users per day (Fig. 3c).
Given the country of origin of the inquiry, the expected greatest use is related to the region, with the dominance of inquiries from Croatia (71%), followed by BiH (6.6%), Serbia (2.7%), etc., but with a non-negligible number of inquiries originating in the USA, Germany, Italy, etc. (Fig. 3d).
Another indicator -citation, points to the use of  The data accumulated in FCD were also used for the production of a number of basic national works, such as the production of the Red Book (Nikolić and Topić 2005), overview od orchids (Kranjčev 2005), the detection of the Important Plant Area (Nikolić et al. 2010), the review and analysis of endemism (Nikolić et al. 2015) or the production of Flora of Croatia (Nikolić 2020a(Nikolić , 2020b(Nikolić , 2020c. Quotes of these and similar works are actually indirectly quoted by FCD as the source of part of the data contained.

Future
There are several challenges ahead for FCD in the coming period. They can be classified into three main groups: