**Abstract**

The valorization of methods for comprehensive data collection is one of the fundamental tools to establish concrete bases and is applicable to lines of work in conservation, preservation, and protection of ecosystems. During the last 20 years, from the Botany Laboratory and Herbarium Trelew, we have valued the Floristic-Holistic Method that we have been adapting, for flora surveys. Method is intensively used in some Argentine provinces of arid, semiarid, and subhumid zones of the South American Arid Diagonal (Santa Cruz, Chubut, Río Negro, Neuquén, Mendoza, and arid islands of the Patagonian Atlantic coast). This revaluation focuses its importance on not only providing information on ecological parameters (bare soil, topsoil, living plant cover, and dead plant cover), richness, equitability, and floristic diversity, but also on status, conservation, botanical types, biological forms, adaptations, plant density, percentages of protected species, potential invasions of exotic species, forage productivity, and animal receptivity. The information is comprehensive and adaptable to different situations, applicable to different plant associations, types of terrain, and landscape units (open and closed mount, shrubby steppes, subshrubs, grasses, wastelands, rocky fields, peladales, and all kinds of modified areas). The method thus holistically conceptualizes ecosystem goods and services, allowing their study at different scales.

**Keywords:** flora, method, south American arid diagonal, grasslands, mount, steppe
