The Illustrated Flora of British Columbia available online

On the E-Flora BC home page, we now link to online copies of the eight-volume Illustrated Flora of British Columbia (by George Douglas, Del Meidinger, Jim Pojar and Gerald Straley). These have been made available by the Province in PDF format. View web site and access the PDFs here.

Opening the PDFs allows users to browse through entire volumes, view family and genus groupings, and access the taxonomic keys. (Note, though, that because these are scanned copies of the publications, they are not 'searchable' PDFs, so the 'find' feature doesn't work). 

The Illustrated Flora of British Columbia forms the bulk of information for vascular plants on E-Flora BC. It is out-of-date--many more species have been added to the flora since its publication and many names have changed. However, it is still the definitive work for BC, and the keys are invaluable in making plant identifications.  While E-Flora BC brings much of it online, the PDFs allow you to view family and genus groupings at a glance, which is helpful during identification work.