Created in March 1999, by the State of São Paulo Research Foundation/FAPESP (www.fapesp.br/en), the BIOTA/FAPESP Program, aimed not only at discovering, mapping and analyzing the origins, diversity and distribution of the flora and fauna of the State of São Paulo, but also at evaluating the possibilities of sustainable exploitation of plants or animals with economic potential and assisting in the formulation of conservation policies on forest remnants. The BIOTA/FAPESP Program, also known as The Virtual Institute of Biodiversity owing to the form of its organization, integrating researchers from several institutions and their students. Scientists from the leading public universities in the state of São Paulo, research institutes and non-governmental organizations participate in projects to discover, map and analyze the biodiversity distributed in land and marine environments and in other ecosystems, as well as proposing alternatives and public policies to preserve it. BIOTA/FAPESP involves around 1,200 professionals (900 researchers and students from São Paulo, 150 collaborators from other states and 80 from abroad). The information produced by the BIOTA/FAPESP Program (www.biota.org.br) is in databases open to the scientific community of Brazil and abroad. Standardization of the collections has made it possible to construct the Environmental Information System, SinBiota 2.1 (http://sinbiota.biota.org.br), which registers and integrates the collections of plants or animals carried out in the State of São Paulo, with geographical coordinates of thousands of species, which may be consulted using the scientific name of the plant or animal, or the name of the collector, or the locality or date of collection. Other developments of BIOTA/FAPESP are the electronic scientific magazine Biota Neotropica (www.biotaneotropica.org.br), with the relevant results of studies on biodiversity in the Neotropical region, associated or not with the Program, and the Biota Network of Bioprospection and Biotest (BIOprospecTA – www.bipprospecta.org.br), which integrates research groups in the State of São Paulo engaged, directly or indirectly, with the prospection of new compounds of economic interest in microorganisms, macroscopic fungi, plants, invertebrates (including marine) and vertebrates. In 2007, in conjunction with the State Secretary of the Environment, the Program produced the book Guidelines for the conservation and restoration of the State of São Paulo (launched in November 2008) and a series of maps which constitute the scientific support to orient the strategies of conservation, preservation and restoration of the native biodiversity in the State of São Paulo. Today, there are 23 legal instruments of environmental legislation of the State of São Paulo based in this results and maps. The Science Plan & Strategies for the Next Decade of the BIOTA/FAPESP Program is available at http://www.fapesp.br/biota/10scienceplan.pdf