Scientific Data Resources
The curators of botanical data.
Plants of the World Online
Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an international collaborative programme that has as a primary aim to make available digitized data of the world’s flora gathered from the past 250 years of botanical exploration and research. POWO also aims to make freely available electronic data created by different projects but that no longer have an online presence or where data was never made available externally. It delivers information on the taxonomy, identification, images, distribution, traits, threat status, molecular phylogenies and uses of vascular plants worldwide. The data are sourced from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as well as its partners and collaborators who generously contribute data and make it openly accessible on POWO.
Launched in March 2017 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with an initial focus on tropical African Floras was made possible through the generous support of our benefactors, Michel and Hélène David-Weill. POWO’s aim is to empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists, horticulturalists, farmers, gardeners and plant enthusiasts globally. The codebase is open source and Kew supports existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs.
All data incorporated into POWO are attached to the currently accepted name from the WCVP names backbone. Descriptive data published in the past one hundred years are digitized under the name used at the time. Because of continuous research and better insights into how plants are related to each other, plant names have had to be changed and therefore the original name under which the data was published may differ from the name under which it is currently displayed on POWO. Full synonymy is provided in POWO, so it is easy to find the data under any name you search for as well as indicating with each descriptive element the original name under which the data were published.
In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that relevant data can be harvested for research purposes and to be incorporated by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling the POWO data providers to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020. The latest version of the WCVP names and geography backbone can be downloaded from the tab “DATA” or the Research Repository.
International Plant Names Index
The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a nomenclatural index of names of vascular plants published under the Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (ICN).
The records in IPNI originally came from three sources in 2000, the Index Kewensis (IK), the Gray Card Index (GCI) and the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI). Index Filicum, covering the ferns (and incorporating lycophytes published after 1960), was added in 2004. Since then various other smaller datasets have been incorporated, details can be found on the acknowledgments page.
IK included only the genus and species of seed plants. The Gray Card Index names included vascular plants of the New World. The Australian Plant Name Index records names for all Australian plants but its contribution to IPNI is restricted to the vascular plants.
An automated deduplication process was applied to the data in 2016 and the current website search results display only the ‘top’ copy of duplicated entries from one of the three sources mentioned above. Links to the duplicate records from the other data sources are shown in the full record view and the data are still visible when clicked.
Since appearing online in 2000, IPNI has been continuously curated: editors screen available literature and publications daily and add newly published names to the database, along with their rank, type information, authors, place of publication and exact publication dates. Authors publishing in journals or books to which there is limited access are encouraged to send copies of their publications to the editors in order to ensure their new names are included. The website is updated daily at around 4am GMT.
World Flora Online Project
There are an estimated 400,000 species of vascular plants on Earth, with some 10 per cent more yet to be discovered. These plants, both known and unknown, may hold answers to many of the world’s health, social, environmental and economic problems. A full inventory of plant life is vital if many threatened species are to be protected and if their full potential is to be realised before many of these species, and the possibilities they offer, become extinct.
In 2010, the updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity included as its first target (Target 1) the need for ‘An online flora of all known plants.’ With this background in mind, in January 2012 in St Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., representatives from four institutions: the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (all members of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation, GPPC) took the initiative to meet and discuss how to achieve GSPC Target 1 by 2020. The meeting resulted in a proposed outline of the scope and content of a World Flora Online (WFO), as well as a decision to form an international consortium of institutions and organisations to collaborate on providing that content.
The WFO project was subsequently launched in India, at an event held during the 11th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in October 2012 where the COP also adopted a decision welcoming the WFO initiative. In January 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding on the WFO was opened for signature. Up to the end of March 2023, 51 institutions and organisations had signed the MOU.
The WFO is an open-access, Web-based compendium of the world’s plant species. It is a collaborative, international project, building upon existing knowledge and published Floras, checklists and revisions but will also require the collection and generation of new information on poorly know plant groups and plants in unexplored regions.
The project represents a major step forward in developing a consolidated global information service on the world’s flora.
Catalogue of Life
An international collaboration
Catalogue of Life (COL) is a collaboration bringing together the effort and contributions of taxonomists and informaticians from around the world. COL aims to address the needs of researchers, policy-makers, environmental managers and the wider public for a consistent and up-to-date listing of all the world’s known species. COL also supports those who need to manage their own taxonomic information and species lists.
Our mission
COL brings together information from taxonomists studying every group of organisms to construct an integrated view of currently accepted species across all taxonomic groups. The primary mission of COL is to deliver a freely accessible list of all species and show which species is referenced by any scientific name, but the tools and services offered by COL also enable taxonomists and other stakeholders to publish and revise species lists for any purpose.
The challenge of scientific names
After more than 260 years of effort building on the foundations laid by Linnaeus, scientists currently recognise around two million species, but the number of published scientific names is much higher. As taxonomists revise their understanding of each group of organisms, they re-interpret previously published species concepts and map existing names against the set of species they consider to be valid.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.
To document Earth’s species and understand the complexities of swiftly-changing ecosystems in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change, researchers need something that no single library can provide — access to the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity. While natural history books and archives contain information that is critical to studying biodiversity, much of this material is available in only a handful of libraries globally. Scientists have long considered this lack of access to biodiversity literature as a major impediment to the efficiency of scientific research.
Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to address this challenge by digitizing the natural history literature held in their collections and making it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”