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The shortage of reliable primary taxonomic data limits the description of biological taxa and the understanding of biodiversity patterns and processes, complicating biogeographical, ecological, and evolutionary studies. This deficit creates a significant taxonomic impediment to biodiversity research and conservation planning. The taxonomic impediment and the biodiversity crisis are widely recognized, highlighting the urgent need for reliable taxonomic data. Over the past decade, numerous countries worldwide have devoted considerable effort to Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), which called for the preparation of a working list of all known plant species by 2010 and an online world Flora by 2020. Brazil is a megadiverse country, home to more of the world's known plant species than any other country. Despite that, Flora Brasiliensis, concluded in 1906, was the last comprehensive treatment of the Brazilian flora. The lack of accurate estimates of the number of species of algae, fungi, and plants occurring in Brazil contributes to the prevailing taxonomic impediment and delays progress towards the GSPC targets. Over the past 12 years, a legion of taxonomists motivated to meet Target 1 of the GSPC, worked together to gather and integrate knowledge on the algal, plant, and fungal diversity of Brazil. Overall, a team of about 980 taxonomists joined efforts in a highly collaborative project that used cybertaxonomy to prepare an updated Flora of Brazil, showing the power of scientific collaboration to reach ambitious goals. This paper presents an overview of the Brazilian Flora 2020 and provides taxonomic and spatial updates on the algae, fungi, and plants found in one of the world's most biodiverse countries. We further identify collection gaps and summarize future goals that extend beyond 2020. Our results show that Brazil is home to 46,975 native species of algae, fungi, and plants, of which 19,669 are endemic to the country. The data compiled to date suggests that the Atlantic Rainforest might be the most diverse Brazilian domain for all plant groups except gymnosperms, which are most diverse in the Amazon. However, scientific knowledge of Brazilian diversity is still unequally distributed, with the Atlantic Rainforest and the Cerrado being the most intensively sampled and studied biomes in the country. In times of “scientific reductionism”, with botanical and mycological sciences suffering pervasive depreciation in recent decades, the first online Flora of Brazil 2020 significantly enhanced the quality and quantity of taxonomic data available for algae, fungi, and plants from Brazil. This project also made all the information freely available online, providing a firm foundation for future research and for the management, conservation, and sustainable use of the Brazilian funga and flora.

T his paper discusses and proposes a solution for two interrelated problems: how to develop real± time intelligent virtual environments with believable agents over short periods of time, and how to instill emotional believability in these agents. Short development time is achieved using a modular architecture approach, minimizing the communication between modules, and therefore allowing their parallel implementation. Real± time performance is achieved using information redundancy and one± way communication between modules. All these techniques are supported by a theatrical metaphor. T he intelligent virtual environment is divided into three functional units : the dynamic scriptwriter who creates the narrative, the theatrical company and its cast of actors who perform upon it, and the virtual stage managers who handle the cameras and special e ects. T he dynamic scriptwriter is responsible for the management of the synthetic actor inner persona. Personality is expressed as a regular exteriorization of emotions. T hus, the synthetic characters are characterized by a set of valenced reactions exteriorizing their inner goals, beliefs, and attitudes. T he emotional structure is handled by an instantiation of Ortony, Clore, and Collins' cognitive theory of emotions and the agent implementation is inspired by Frijda's two± stage emotional stimuli appraisal theory.T his approach was tested in a real± time application developed under a tight schedule, and exhibited in Lisbon during the last world exposition of the century, Expo'98. T wo synthetic dolphins, the emotional characters of this intelligent virtual environment, were displayed to more than one million visitors over the four months of the exhibition. T his This work was supported by PRAXIS XXI BM/12597/ 97. We would like to express a special thank you to all those who always believed in our work and to all the INESC S3A/RVLab team who made it happen. Thank you making this IVE real. We hope everyone feels grati ed.Pathematic : a. rare (ad. GR.) pathematicos± liable to passion or emotions, s. pathema± what on suOE er, suOE ering emotions, s. stem path± : see pathetic) pertaining to the passions or emotions; caused or characterized by emotions (Oxford English Dictionary).

Brazil is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with about 37,000 species of land plants. Part of this biodiversity is within protected areas. The development of online databases in the last years greatly improved the available biodiversity data. However, the existing databases do not provide information about the protected areas in which individual plant species occur. The lack of such information is a crucial gap for conservation actions. This study aimed to show how the information captured from online databases, cleaned by a protocol and verified by taxonomists allowed us to obtain a comprehensive list of the vascular plant species from the "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia", the first national park founded in Brazil. All existing records in the online database JABOT (15,100 vouchers) were downloaded, resulting in 11,783 vouchers identified at the species level. Overall, we documented 2,316 species belonging to 176 families and 837 genera of vascular plants in the "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia". Considering the whole vascular flora, 2,238 species are native and 78 are non-native. The "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia" houses 13% of the angiosperm and 37% of the fern species known from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Amongst these species, 82 have been cited as threatened, following IUCN categories (CR, EN or VU), seven are data deficient (DD) and 15 have been classified as a conservation priority, because they are only known from a single specimen collected before 1969.

Actual computer image and motion synthesis paradigms are presented in order to introduce a new computer animation paradigm that simulates the traditional pinscreen animation technique. Pinscreen is a very particular and difficult device that enables a “chiaroscuro” approach to image synthesis. The paper describes the traditional pinscreen technique, the way it is operated, results and related difficulties. An extended computer model, including colour and time extensions, to simulate the pinscreen is presented. Results achieved with vector and raster approaches are discussed. Advantages and possibilities of the method when compared with the traditional method and the problems that arise from this technique will also be explained. Finally current and future work is referenced.