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Welcome to the Flora of Tasmania Online

Herbarium botanist collecting plants at Cape Portland, Tasmania, Nov 2018

Herbarium botanist collecting plants at Cape Portland, Tasmania, Nov 2018

This site is a Tasmanian Herbarium project to provide modern vascular plant and lichen Floras for Tasmania. Traditionally Floras are published in book format, but many are now published as websites.

The Tasmanian Herbarium is part of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) and contains the largest collection of Tasmanian plant and fungus specimens anywhere in the world. This site contains both a Vascular Plant Flora and a Lichen Flora for Tasmania.

Experienced botanists working at the Herbarium manage and develop Tasmania’s botanical collections, which consist mainly of Herbarium specimens (such as the Banksia below). They also participate in the annual TMAG Expeditions of Discovery program to build TMAG’s collection of plant specimens and discover new species.

The botanical information on this site is largely the original work of the Herbarium team, with some content contributed by our colleagues from other similar institutions in Australia and overseas.

This Flora is a work in progress and is intended to be updated regularly. It aims to eventually describe the approximately 3000 plants that grow wild in Tasmania (not including non-vascular plants such as mosses, liverworts and algae).

Who is this site for?

Image of specimen of Banksia collected during Captain Cook's third voyage, while on a stopover in Adventure Bay, Tasmania

Silver banksia (Banksia marginata Cav.), Adventure Bay, Bruny Island, collected during Captain James Cook’s 3rd voyage in December 1777

This publication is primarily intended for use by professional botanists and people with a specialist or working knowledge of botany and botanical terms. If you haven’t used a Flora before, there are a few excellent glossaries of botanical terms available online.

The Flora consists of technical descriptions of plants, as well as keys that can be used to identify them, and distribution maps.

If you are looking for more general information on Tasmanian plants, you may find the Parks and Wildlife Service page on plants more useful as a general introduction to Tasmania’s native vegetation.

If you have an interest in citizen science, then projects such as iNaturalist or the Atlas of Living Australia may also be of interest.

How to use this Flora

The main content area of the Flora of Tasmania Online consists of sortable, searchable table pages containing the lists of Current Accounts and Families and Genera in addition to older versions of family accounts.

You can also find a list of recent changes to the Flora of Tasmania Online here.