Decode nature.
Protect it.
We turn the scattered record of the plant world into knowledge nations can use.
Learning from millions of years of evolution, we decode nature: turning data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into action, to protect our precious environment.
of isolation have given Madagascar a plant world that exists nowhere else on Earth.
endemic species.
Around two-thirds of Madagascar's 14,356 recorded plant species grow nowhere else. The forest that holds them is shrinking. Documenting it now is part of protecting it.
* Figures from the IsoGentiX Flora database. How they update →
Why documenting it now matters.
Madagascar's flora is vanishing faster than science can record it. Much of what survives hangs on a single specimen, and almost none of it has been read at the genetic level.
Lost before they are known
Madagascar has lost roughly 40% of its forest cover since the 1950s. Two in three of its plants have never been assessed for extinction risk, and thousands of those that have are already threatened. When a forest goes, the species found only there go with it.
Held on a single sheet
608 endemic species are known from just one preserved specimen anywhere on Earth. 573 of them sit in overseas herbaria, only 30 in Antananarivo. If that single sheet is lost, the physical record of the plant is lost with it.
The genome almost unread
Fewer than 3% of Madagascar's endemic plants have been genetically sequenced at all, and just 9 have a finished genome. The deepest layer of knowledge a plant holds, its genome and its chemistry, is almost entirely missing. Decoding it is part of protecting it.
No single institution holds it. We bring it together.
Madagascar's flora has been described for over two centuries, but the record is scattered across dozens of herbaria and databases, in several languages, much of it held only in overseas institutions.
The Flora Portal draws those fragments into one consolidated, fully sourced view, names, images, distribution and provenance, reconciled and traceable to where each came from. More complete than any single public database or herbarium holds anywhere in the world, and put to use in the country it comes from.
endemic species held only abroad
Found nowhere on Earth but Madagascar, yet kept in no Antananarivo institution, reachable, until now, only through overseas collections.
Open the record.
One searchable window onto Madagascar's flora, drawn from open sources and held under the nation's own authority.
* Figures from the IsoGentiX Flora database. How they update →
Business, put to a purpose.
IsoGentiX is a commercial organisation with a social mission. We use business to draw in the investment, philanthropy and partnership that fund the work, enhancing humanity's knowledge of its environment to improve life on Earth.
We gather the data. We decode it into structured information. We build knowledge. We enable action. We protect the environment and serve its people.
Built with the country, and for it.
We help a country gather, decode and use the knowledge in its own biological record, working alongside its government and institutions. Access and benefit-sharing follow the Nagoya Protocol and free, prior and informed consent, so the value stays with the country and the communities it comes from.
Explore the work.
Search the flora
14,356 species, drawn from open sources into one record.
Open → Knowledge BaseUnderstand it
Clear, sourced articles for scientists, students and the curious.
Read → ResourcesGo further
The herbaria and open resources the record is built on.
Browse →* Figures from the IsoGentiX Flora database. How they update →