Taxateca.com is a web page in which a digital version of a private living creatures collection can be seen. This collection has been done by Carlos Galan Boluda, and it contains biological samples of thousands of different species correctly identified and belonging to any kingdom of life, from bacteria to vertebrates. Part of the plant collection is maintained alive in the Taxateca’s Botanical Garden. The collection has scientific and didactic finalities, and samples have been collected from out of protected areas or with special permits if they are required.
The collection is maintained under controlled temperature and humidity conditions to improve the samples preservation. Each species showed on this web contains a preserved representative sample on the collection. When posible, the entire organism is preserved, but when species are too big, representative parts are mantained, like skulls or herborized branches with fruits and flowers. Each samples is preserved in a different way depending of its properties, mantaining its DNA stable for future analysis. As collection is for public and researching uses, samples can be send to any person that request it for scientific purposes.
The Botanical Garden is emplaced in a 2.000 m2 terrain in the Mediterranean coast of Valencia, in Spain. Thousands of interesting plant specimens are mantained in different simulated environments, from a desert to a tropical rainforest.
The collection contains samples from all the world, indicated as red points on the map above. It is specially rich in plant and fungal samples, as many research projects has been done on this field. Some of the species shown on this web do not contain a sample on the collection because they have been donated to museums, universities, or other institutions. Many other species, although are shown on this web, has not a collected sample. On these cases, species have been seen and photographed on the described site, but not collected because the appropiate collection permits are lacking.
The Flora of Madagascar Project
Flora of Madagascar is a project carried out by the biologist Carlos Galan Boluda which aims to make a series of books for the identification of the plants and fungi of Madagascar. It is a project that lacks funding and is currently written in Spanish, although it is intended that in the future it will be translated into English and French. The current version can be downloaded at the following link:
FLORA OF MADAGASCAR, A PHOTO GUIDE
