Sharing information is the lifeblood of scientific research. Today the Garden is the world leader in gathering and providing up-to-date computerized botanical information to scientists and environmental policy planners.

Originally created by Garden researchers in the early 1980s as a internal tool, today TROPICOS is freely available to the scientific community on the Internet. In 1996, the Garden developed w3TROPICOS, a user-friendly graphic interface accessible on the Garden website at http://www.tropicos.org/.

TROPICOS includes nearly 1,555,000 specimen records, over 865,000 scientific names, and more than 80,000 bibliographic citations, plus thousands of images of living plants, herbarium specimens, and associated data. The Garden website receives about 7,000 requests for botanical information every day.

In addition, every floristic project based at the Garden posts information on the website as it is developed. This makes crucial data accessible to environmental planners and scientists years before the flora is ready for final publication.