About the database

The southernmost tip of Africa is famous for its extraordinary rich and unique flora that led to establish it as worldwide hotspot of plant diversity and separate floristic element – the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR; Born et al. 2007, Manning & Goldblatt 2012, Snijman 2013). It extends the boundary of the Core Cape Subregion (CCS; Manning & Goldblatt 2012) to include regions housing winter rainfall succulent karoo (Extra Cape Subregion, ECS; Snijman 2013, Allsopp et al. 2014). The GCFR is recognized as important centre of plant diversity and endemism on Earth (Myers et al. 2000), because it harbours more than 11 000 species, and it displays a species-level endemism up to 77.9% (Born et al. 2007, Manning & Goldblatt 2012, Snijman 2013). Similar species richness is remarkable and comparable to the most diverse floras worldwide (Mayers et al. 2000, Goldblatt & Manning 2002). Additionally, ECS is the only arid region in the world identified as a biodiversity hotspot and reaching up to 40.4% of species endemism (Snijman 2013).

Despite broadly accepted concept of weak contribution of polyploidization events in evolution of tremendous diversity in the GCFR (reviewed by Oberlander et al. 2016), some recent works suggested that another level of complexity and diversity is likely hidden behind the extraordinary species richness (e.g. Krejčíková et al. 2013, Schmickl et al. 2015, Linder et al. 2017) – i.e. hidden world of various ploidy levels, whole-genome changes, intraspecific genome size variation, etc. The database is dedicated to untangling the extent of these unrecognized phenomena and their contribution to evolution of plant diversity in the GCFR.

The main goal of the database is to gather reliable data on various aspects of whole-genome changes (variation in ploidy level, genome size, chromosome counts) in plants from the GCFR and provide them to scientific community in unify form for further analyses.

When using data from our database, please cite

GSDB (): Genome size database of the Greater Cape flora, Facilitated by Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences. Published on the Internet; https://botany.natur.cuni.cz/gsdb/, Retrieved .

The database is still under heavy development, several important features are not implemented yet and user interface is not finished. If having some feature request or any other comments, contact developer.