Have a look at http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.160.1.1

A catalogue of the vascular plants of the Caatinga Phytogeographical Domain: a synthesis of floristic and phytosociological surveys

and perhaps a word with Marcelo Moro...

Hi Majid, I have done this for my PhD. I aggregated many individual floristic lists to analyze general patterns in the Caatinga, the tropical dry forests of Brazil. But how to analyze your data depends on what are your objectives.

As Zappi told above, I have produced a catalogue for the Caatinga Dry forests of Brazil presenting all plant names reported in these floristic lists, evaluating which are the common species, the richest families/genera and also using rarefaction and richness estimation to evaluate how many species are expected to exist in these dry forests, but were not collected. Now I am using the same dataset to evaluate biogeographical patterns in Caatinga using multivariate analyses. After this I'll analyze the phylogenetic structure of the sites to understand how the differences in environment affect the phylogenetic structure of plant communities.

In summary, you have to compile florisitic surveys available in the literature, add the species reported in each list in a database and analyze the patterns on the data. But to analyze the patterns on the data it depends strongly on what you want to do. For biogeography you generally will need multivariate analysis. For a catalogue (like the one I'm sending you) you can use a more descriptive approach.

I strongly recommend Brahms, from Oxford University, to build your database. Do not use Excel, as Excel is not tailored to deal with biodiveristy data and has lots of limitations.

Please, described in detail what you intend to do with the data and I can try to suggest some procedures to help you.

All the best

Article A catalogue of the vascular plants of the Caatinga Phytogeog...

Dear Marcelo Freire Moro,

Daniela C Zappi,

Juha Alatalo,

Hi, 

Thank all you for considerations. My data set consists of about 170 published floristic studies (by various authors). Extracted data needed to be spell checked and it is being finished soon.

I was unable to download your paper: A catalogue of the vascular plants of the Caatinga Phytogeographical Domain: a synthesis of floristic and phytosociological surveys.

Would you please send to my email address: [email protected]

Please see this URL (a simple demo of my program):

http://www.sku.ac.ir/academic/members/sharifi-m/files/Iran.wmv

I'm still developing this program.

Would be happy to receive your suggestions.

http://www.sku.ac.ir/academic/members/sharifi-m/files/Iran.wmv

Hi Majid,

You can record all floristic data and after all species reported in these papers using Brahms database (http://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/). You can check spells and synonyms for the whole list using the "Plant Miner" system or the related Plant Miner R Package: http://plantminer.com/ (you can find the R package at GitHub). Plant Miner checks a list of names against the database of The Plant List, returning correct spells and suggesting the accepted names for synonyms.

You can also download the whole name list from The Plant List and append it to Brahms, so you can check you list of species at Brahms while typing your names there.

Dear Marcelo Freire Moro,

Than you for your helpful comments.

As pointed out by Marcelo, it depends on what you want to achieve. if you want to determine phytogeographical patters (floristic regions and elements), and the environmental factors responsible for these, there are several classification techniques to choose from: see

Kent M. 2006. Numerical classification and ordination methods in biogeography. Progress in Physical Geography 30: 399–408.

Kent M. 2012. Vegetation description and data analysis: a practical approach, 2nd edn. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester

Thanks all.

I appreciate your responses and guides.