| URL | www.theplantlist.org |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Encyclopedia |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Created by | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden |
| Launched | December 2010 |
The Plant List is a list of botanical names of species of plants, available on the world wide web. It was created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden.[1] It is intended to be comprehensive, that is, deal with all known names of species.
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The Plant List has 1,040,426 scientific plant names of species rank of which 298,900 are accepted species names, belonging to 620 plant families and 16,167 plant genera.[2]. The Plant List accepts approximately 300,000 unique species, with 480,000 synonyms for those species, meaning that many had been 'rediscovered' and renamed several times by botanists. The Plant List has determined that another 260,000 names are 'unresolved', meaning that botanists have so far been unable to determine whether they are a separate species or a duplication of the 300,000 unique species.[3]
The Plant List has attracted public attention[4], one source even going so far as to claim "The Plant List attempts to identify every plant known to science."[3] The Plant List is also linked to English naturalist Charles Darwin, who in the 1880s started a plant list entitled Index Kewensis that contained 400,000 names of species with an average of 6,000 species being added to it every year since it was first published.[3]