Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Chuck Miller (chuck.miller@mobot.org), Walter Berendsohn (w.berendsohn@bo.berlin), William Ulate (william.ulate@mobot.org)
Received: 23 Aug 2022 | Published: 24 Aug 2022
© 2022 Chuck Miller, Walter Berendsohn, William Ulate
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Miller C, Berendsohn W, Ulate W (2022) The World Flora Online: Summary and Status. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e93898. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.93898
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The World Flora Online (WFO) project was initiated in 2012 in response to Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation – "To create an online flora of all known plants by 2020" (
The World Flora Online Public Portal (www.worldfloraonline.org) was relaunched in July, 2022. It is populated with a taxonomic backbone of plant taxonomic data, which integrates the International Plant Name Index (IPNI), World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP,
WFO also includes by now over 600,000 “content” data items gathered from digital floras and monographs, and other sources like International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) threat assessments and the Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) Global Tree Assessment. Content data can be text descriptions, images, geographic distributions, identification keys, phylogenetic trees, as well as atomized trait data like threat status, lifeform or habitat of a taxon. Over 30 digital descriptive datasets have been received from sources such as Flora of Brazil, Flora of South Africa, Flora of China, Flora of North America, Flora of Thailand and many others. WFO aims at clearly showing the original sources to give credit to the authors, both for backbone and content data.
Extensive work is required to match the names associated with the submitted descriptions to the names and WFO-IDs in the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone and then merging the descriptive data elements into the WFO Portal. Numerous techniques have been adopted and created to accomplish the data cleaning, standardization and transformation required before descriptive data can be integrated. Among the new tools created is a system called Rhakhis developed at Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (
This presentation will focus on the current state and plans for the future of the World Flora Online.
flora, plants, plant names, plant taxonomy, plant descriptions, global strategy for plant conservation, taxonomic expert network
Chuck Miller, William Ulate
TDWG 2022