The greatest impact of the Protea Atlas Project was the large amount of new data that was collected.

Lets look at the commonest protea species in the Cape Flora - Leucadendron salignum.

To set the record straight, this species occurred in 40% of all localities that were atlassed - so that almost half of all sites in the Cape Flora with proteas have this species on it!

The pre-atlas data - taking all the data from the herbarium records that we could find - showed that this species occurred throughout the flora in 172 Grid Cells.

(These are 12X12km grid cells, or a 1:50 000 series map divided into four - if you want to play with the data, you can obtain Worldmap and look at other species as well.

It was both widespread and well distributed.

Atlas data found the species to occur in 472 Grid Cells - more than twice as many. Moreover, it occurs almost continuously throughout the area, not only in little blocks.

Note that despite all the atlas data there are still 10 Grid Cells (shown as hollow circles) where we did not find Ld salignum, even though there are herbarium data for those areas. We don’t know why they were not found there! They may be extinct, extremely isolated, bad localities, errors in capturing the herbarium data or something else - without more work we cannot say.