AUSTRALIAN BUPRESTIDAE - HOST PLANT ASSOCIATIONS

The vision of what I would like to see here.

Since the data from the 2002 Zoological Catalogue of Australia volume 29.5 on Buprestidae is available on-line, it is time to begin the enhancement of that mostly systematic
work by first publishing and then adding to the ABRS database additional data about host plants and distribution.

I imagine a complete list of Australian Buprestidae matched with all published records of both larval and adult plant host records.

The plant systematics will be completely modernized referring to The Plant List, the great international collaboration building "a working list of all plant species."
That way, older names, now often lost in synonymy to a name not immediately recognized, can be located in the lists of synonyms given for each Accepted
name in The Plant List.

Images of those plants will be available through both Australian and international projects where such exist. Currently two such efforts in Australia are linked.

For now a list of the Buprestidae associated with each plant host can be given, those with adult feeding or other behavior are given in italics, while those plants
confirmed as larval host plants are given in bold.

Eventually images of each species of Buprestidae will be linked from various websites.

The Gymnosperms have been done as a demonstration. There really are very few native and introduced gymnosperms in Australia and these have relatively
few Buprestidae recorded in association. The great breadth of the Angiospermae, especially with Australia's huge diversity of Fabaceae and Myrtaceae,
will take much longer.

There are requirements to publish much new data on Australian Buprestidae plant host associations and currently four of us are combining efforts to publish
a full summary of all that has been previously recorded and to offer the first parts of new data as a model for our future efforts or as an example to others
who may wish to work in collaboration or parallel.