Census and Classification of Plant Resources in the Solomon Islands — Specimens Dataset

Occurrence Specimen
Latest version published by National Museum of Natural Science on Apr 5, 2026 National Museum of Natural Science
Publication date:
April 5, 2026
License:
CC-BY 4.0

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 13,647 records in English (581 KB) - Update frequency: as needed
Metadata as an EML file download in English (11 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file download in English (7 KB)

Description

The Solomon Islands is a country in Oceania, consisting of nearly 1,000 islands and covering a land area of 28,400 square kilometres. It is located in the southwest Pacific at the northeast end of Australia and east of Papua New Guinea. Its geographical location, tropical climate, and mountainous topography provide it with a rich and diverse flora, harbouring over 7,000 vascular plant species. However, in recent decades, the coverage of primary forests has declined rapidly due to logging and the increasing coverage of economic plantations. The situation has seriously threatened the country's biodiversity. Since 2012, The “Census and Classification of Plant Resources in the Solomon Islands” project has been conducting collaboratively by Solomon Islands (Ministry of Forestry and Honiara Botanical Gardens), Taiwan (International Cooperation and Development Fund, National Museum of Natural Science, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, National Tsing Hua University, and Koo Botanical Conservation Center), and Japan (Makino Botanical Garden). This project aims to bring awareness to the abundant plant resources and comprehensive flora of the country and to facilitate plant conservation. During the expedition in 2012 and 2013, over 15,000 sheets of specimens representing about 700 species of vascular plants were collected. The results provide an insight into the spectacular floral diversity of the Solomon Islands.This dataset is currently being worked on to enrich its metadata. Any comments and suggestions are welcome. Please reach out to the resource creator. Thanks.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 13,647 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

Occurrence (core)
13647
Multimedia 
13636

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is National Museum of Natural Science. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 154947b6-0e29-40da-962f-a0d6e3f12a07.  National Museum of Natural Science publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility.

Keywords

Occurrence; Specimen

Contacts

Chihjen Ko
  • Originator ●
  • Point Of Contact
950 Taitung City
TW
Aleck Yang
  • Metadata Provider
National Museum of Natural Science
Taichung City
TW
Jing-Fu Tsai
  • Curator
National Museum of Natural Science
Taichung City
TW

Geographic Coverage

The expedition was conducted in the Solomon Islands.

Bounding Coordinates South West [-12.011, 156], North East [-6, 164.008]

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 1945-10-15 / 2015-08-26

Additional Metadata

Coordinate values are as originally recorded and may be of low precision. Due to the narrow land area of many Solomon Islands, rounded coordinates frequently fall offshore, triggering GBIF's continent and country coordinate mismatch flags. However, the coordinates still need further investigation to decide whether updates are needed.

Acknowledgements
Alternative Identifiers 154947b6-0e29-40da-962f-a0d6e3f12a07
https://cloud.gbif.org/asia/resource?r=siflora_2012_nmns_tw