IPNI

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database of botanical names. It indexes names of seed plants, ferns and "fern allies". Coverage is best at the rank of species and genus (see e.g. IK). It includes basic bibliographical details, associated with the names, and its goals include eliminating the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names.

IPNI is the product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium. The IPNI database is a collection of the names registered by the three cooperating institutions and they work towards standardizing the information. The standard of author abbreviations recommended by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature is Brummitt and Powell’s Authors of Plant Names, a digital (and updated) version of which can be consulted online at IPNI.

IPNI is available at ipni.org, free of charge, with two mirror sites. Note that IPNI provides names "as published": it is not a list of correct names.

A somewhat comparable project is the Index Fungorum, which lists names of fungi.