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Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden announce the completion of The Plant List
31st December 2010

On December 29 2010,  The Plant List was launched. It provides a way of linking the different scientific names used for a particular species together, thus meeting the needs of the conservation community by providing reliable names for all communication about plants and their uses.

 

The Plant List includes 1.25 million scientific plant names, of which 1.04 million are names of species rank. Of the species names included in The Plant List, about 300,000 (29%) are accepted names for species and about 480,000 (46%) are recorded as synonyms of those plant species. The status of the remaining 260,000 names is “unresolved” since the contributing data sets do not contain sufficient evidence to decide whether they should be accepted names or synonyms.

The Plant List includes a further 204,000 scientific plant names of infraspecific taxonomic rank linked to those species names. These numbers will change in the future as data quality improves.

“All validly published names for plants to the level of species have been included in The Plant List, the majority of them synonyms; no names have been deleted,”

said Dr. Peter H. Raven, President Emeritus, Missouri Botanical Garden.

 

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