Scientists are working on the latest version of the Chinese Virtual Herbarium to provide easy access to an improved checklist of China's flora, said a botanist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on the fourth day of the Third Global Botanical Gardens Congress in Wuhan, central China on Thursday.

"We are putting together a third version of the herbarium with updated plant data and better-structured data bases," said Professor Ma Keping, director of the Institute of Botany, CAS.

He said that the Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH) was established in October 2004, with the first version base on specimens listed in the Flora of China, a national plant checklist of 30,000 plant species completed in early 2004. The second version saw daylight in September 2006.

More than two million regular specimens and 3,000 type specimens are now listed in the CVH, which has four modules including digitized specimens, a plant database, e-flora and photos, said Ma.

In addition, more than 27,300 plant color photos from about 3,784 species have been uploaded to the CVH, he said.

"We have also developed a search engine for major international herbaria and related databases," Ma said.

They will complete the Catalogue of Life China in late 2007, which will include a national checklist of higher plants and vertebrates, and some fungi and bacteria, he said.

With assistance from foreign botanic gardens including the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, CVH version 3 will provide more convenient access, powerful search engines and better categorized data for users, Ma said.

(Xinhua News Agency April 19, 2007)