The flora in the area between Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como was examined in detail according to the grid defined in Ehrendorfer & Hamann (CFCE, 1965). Similar projects were already realised for other parts of Europe, for example Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Chech republic. In Italia the grid was used for the floristic cartography in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, Bozen, Trento, Vicenza, Belluno and in the regions Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Emilia Romagna and Lazio.The area has an extension of 1200 km2.
For every field of the grid (size about 5×6 km2) a list as complete as possible of all the species was compiled considering possibly all habitats. In this way it was made sure, that all parts of the area very investigated equally, also those considered “uninteresting” by the botanists of the past as the densely populated ones in the south.
The plants were identified with standard (Pignatti, 1982; Binz & Heitz, 1990; Fischer et al., 2008) and with special literature from scientific journals. Very useful was the exchange with other botanists and enthusiast and the internet forum ActaPlantarum.
For the 50 fields of the grid about 24.000 data entries were collect of which 6.800 from the recent literature (last 35 years) and other databases. Because of the limited resources usually only one finding for each field and species was registered. This still permitted to draw complete distribution maps according to the CFCE grid.