A program to integrate species diversity information systems was launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in January 2018, with funding from the CAS Earth project, a Strategic Priority Research Program of CAS. The program will create a series of data products, such as China flora online, species catalogues, distribution maps, software tools for data mining and knowledge discovery based on big data and artificial intelligence technology, and a service platform and portal highlighting species diversity information in China. The products and platform will provide the robust data to support decision making on biodiversity conservation, fundamental research on biodiversity evolution and spatial patterns, and species identification for citizen science. China flora online will include 35,000 species of higher plants in China and an online editing environment for botanists to maintain the floral records. The trait database will include structured data of animals, plants and fungi, such as weight, height, length, color and shape of organisms. This species catalogue will be the annually updated version of the Catalogue of Life, China. The distribution maps will show the spatial pattern for each species of vertebrate animal and higher plant. Cell phone apps will help users to easily and quickly identify plants in the field. The mechanism and workflow for data collection, integration, public sharing and quality control will be built up in the next few years.
