Florabank1 is a database that contains distributional data on the wild flora indigenous species, archeophytes and naturalised aliens) of Flanders and the Brussels Capital Region. It holds about 3 million records of vascular plants, dating from 1800 till present. Furthermore, it includes ecological data on vascular plant species, redlist category information, Ellenberg values, legal status, global distribution, seed bank etc. The database is an initiative of "Flo.Wer" (http://www.plantenwerkgroep.be], the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) (http://www.inbo.be) and the National Botanic Garden of Belgium (http://www.br.fgov.be). Florabank aims at centralizing botanical distribution data gathered by both professional and amateur botanists and to make these data available to the benefit of nature conservation, policy and scientific research. The occurrence data contained in Florabank1 are extracted from checklists, literature and herbarium specimen information. Of survey lists, the locality name (verbatimLocality], species name, observation date and IFBL square code - the grid system used for plant mapping in Belgium (Van Rompaey 1943) - are recorded. For records dating from the period 1972 2004 all pertinent botanical journals dealing with Belgian flora were systematically screened. Analysis of herbarium specimens in the collection of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium, the University of Ghent and the University of Liege provided interesting distribution knowledge concerning rare species, this information is also included in Florabank1.