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I. Background

Since the biosystematic approach to plant taxonomy has grown into an important venture in recent decades, the need for some aid in retrieval of pertinent information has long been pressing. This has been clearly recognized, especially by the large membership of the International Organization of Plant Biosystematists, which already in 1960 made information retrieval one of its main goals. The matter has been discussed at every meeting of this organization, but not until the Botanical Congress in Seattle in early September, 1969 was there any new progress available to demonstrate in what way this might be achieved. At that meeting, the Co-Principal Investigators presented their first attempts at computerizing available chromosome information in a data bank; although the results were only preliminary, they met with enormous enthusiasm and the venture was strongly supported and endorsed by the IOPB membership and executives.

Although biosystematic data are of various kinds, the majority of them at present are directly connected with chromosome studies and, especially, with determinations of chromosome numbers. The first chromosome numbers were counted in 1882 by the French botanist Guignard and the German botanist Strasburger, but it took more than a generation before the taxonomical importance of such studies became generally recognized. Not until around 1940 did the significance of this approach become generally acknowledged as the strongest basis for evolutionary classification, with the result that the number of published chromosome numbers has grown from about 500 in 1910 to well above 7,000 in 1969. Although only about 40,000-45,000 species of higher plants and around 10,000 species of lower plants have been studied from this point of view, the published items are well over 400,000, in more than 20,000 different publications. These numbers indicate the magnitude of the problem, because all other biosystematic publications together are estimated to reach less than ten percent of this figure. It ought to be mentioned that although chromosome numbers are important for solving many taxonomic and evolutionary problems, they are also of great value for studies of dispersal and distribution, and for all phases of practical and theoretical cytogenetics, and that the number, morphology, and size of chromosomes are known to be significant for the