Floristics

Floristics is a branch of botany concerned with the distribution and diversity of plant species within a defined geographic area or across larger regions. It focuses on documenting the flora of a place through inventories and checklists, and on analyzing the spatial patterns of plant life—what species occur where, and how abundances vary across habitats. Floristics often produces regional or national floras, which serve as reference works for researchers, land managers, and conservationists.

Historically, botanists compiled floras as exploration and collection expanded knowledge of plant life. Today floristics combines field surveys, herbarium studies, and taxonomic verification to produce reliable species lists, distributions, and chorotypes (geographic affinity patterns). In addition to presence–absence data, quantitative floristics may include relative abundance and cover, where data allow.

Subfields include elementary or regional floristics (the flora of a local area) and biogeographic floristics (regional flora within a larger geographic framework). Floristics intersects with phytogeography and plant geography but remains distinct in its emphasis on cataloging and mapping plant distributions, rather than testing evolutionary or environmental mechanisms alone.

Modern floristics relies on digital tools, GIS, online floras, and biodiversity databases to update records and model distributions. Notable floras include the Flora of China, Flora Europaea, and Flora of North America. Applications include biodiversity inventories, conservation planning, ecological restoration, invasive species monitoring, and baseline data for climate change research.