The best way to summarize the achievements of atlassers and the Protea Atlas Project is to look a the changes to the distribution patterns or patterns of biodiversity that we found. (If you want to explore these more, see Worldmap)

The three most obvious impacts of the Protea Atlas Project were to discover:

• That proteas were common on the GrootRivier and KleinWinterhoek Mountains in the east of the region (where they had been barely recroded before on these botanically unexplored ranges), and lots of new records (and new species) from the arid interior regions of the area (under-explored arid areas).

• At the same time the historical peaks in records from the mountains - which showed were the mountain passes occurred, are now smoothed over along these mountain ranges. Interestingly, the Riviersonderend Mountains were found to have been badly explored, possibly because of the lack of free-flowing water in this range.

• The unwelcome news was that the Cape Flats showed many extinctions. Apart from the example of Diastella proteoides shown earlier, we also have Serruria furcellata and Se aemula congesta which could not be found, despite many searches within their known habitat. These two species must therefore be considered extinct in the wild (two plants of Se furcellata are still growing at the nursery at the University of the Western Cape - Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden has obtained cuttings from these). Many other species have had their distribution ranges decimated in the Cape Flats.