The Flora North America Program will create a computer data bank of taxonomic information about the vascular plants of North America north of Mexico. The system, which will serve a broad range of users, will provide for the acquisition, editing, and storage of data and the preparation of a variety of products. It will grow and evolve over a long period of time, continually incorporating changes to data and new categories of information as they become available. The system will utilize an existing computer program package, the IBM Generalized Information System (GIS), for creating, maintaining, querying, and generating reports from its files of data. In addition to a file of taxonomic, ecological, and geographic data about each taxon, the system will build and maintain a series of authority or dictionary files to control system content. The first major system product will be a published flora, generated by computer. Many other catalogs and indexes will be prepared and specific questions may be asked of the data bank to meet individual user needs for information.