(Plant) Family Portraits
The plants described in the Flora Odessa belong to 77 different families. As you can see from the bubble viz below, the distribution was anything but even. Your eye will be drawn at first to the Sunflowers, Legumes, and Mustards, but use the filter to draw out the more boutique families: sometimes, and especially in the world of biodiversity studies, rarity and significance go hand in hand.
To make the families more relatable we collected botanical illustrations from the open-access Biodiversity Heritage Library and from Harvard's CURIOSity Digital Collections. Each family attested in the Flora is represented by the illustration of a single species. Hover over an image to reveal the family name or click to open the media file.
