World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants

Borsch, Thomas; Berendsohn, Walter G.; Dalcin, Eduardo Couto; Delmas, Maïté; Demissew, Sebsebe; Elliott, Alan; Fritsch, Peter W.; Fuchs, Anne; Geltman, D. V.; Güner, Adil; Haevermans, Thomas; Knapp, Sandra; Roux, M.M. Le; Loizeau, Pierre-André; Miller, Chuck; Miller, James S.; Miller, Joseph T.; Palese, Raoul; Paton, Alan; Parnell, John A. N.; Pendry, Colin A.; Qin, Haining; Sosa, Victoria; Sosef, M.S.M.; Raab-Straube, Eckhard Von; Ranwashe, Fhatani; Raz, Lauren; Salimov, Rashad; Smets, Erik; Thiers, Barbara M.; Thomas, Wm. Wayt; Tulig, Melissa; Ulate, William; Ung, Visotheary; Watson, Mark; Jackson, Peter; Zamora, Nelson

doi:10.1002/tax.12373

Cited by 82 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…WCVP has contributed data to the Catalogue of Life (CoL) and now provides 35% of vascular plant CoL content 31 . With increasing collaboration between CoL and GBIF in the CoL+ project 6 and support of the World Flora on-line community 7 , CoL+ is likely to become the central hub for access to community-supported consensus taxonomic species lists covering all life. WCVP will provide its data through these initiatives, and will both work with TENs and provide taxon concept data for taxa not covered by any TEN.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity

et al. 2021

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The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) is a comprehensive list of scientifically described plant species, compiled over four decades, from peer-reviewed literature, authoritative scientific databases, herbaria and observations, then reviewed by experts. It is a vital tool to facilitate plant diversity research, conservation and effective management, including sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits. To maximise utility, such lists should be accessible, explicitly evidence-based, transparent, expert-reviewed, and regularly updated, incorporating new evidence and emerging scientific consensus. WCVP largely meets these criteria, being continuously updated and freely available online. Users can browse, search, or download a user-defined subset of accepted species with corresponding synonyms and bibliographic details, or a date-stamped full dataset. To facilitate appropriate data reuse by individual researchers and global initiatives including Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Catalogue of Life and World Flora Online, we document data collation and review processes, the underlying data structure, and the international data standards and technical validation that ensure data quality and integrity. We also address the questions most frequently received from users.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…WCVP is replacing TPL1.1. as the taxonomic default for World Flora Online (WFO, www.worldfloraonline.org ), providing taxon concept data for taxa not provided by WFO’s Taxonomic Expert Networks (TENs) 7 .…”

Section: Background and Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity

et al. 2021

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“…Despite continued advances in our capability to map extinction risk across the Tree of Life (ter Steege et al 2015; Jin & Qian 2019), more resources are needed to ensure any global biodiversity indicators are applicable to more than a narrow set of well-studied species groups, and regularly compiled to allow an effective monitoring of the current state of biodiversity. Baselines of these indicators are in production for terrestrial and marine vertebrates, gymnosperms and corals, and under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation the required data will soon be available for all vascular plants, aiding their inclusion (Borsch et al 2020). The IUCN SSC Phylogenetic Diversity Task Force has committed to generating the two indicators outlined here at global and national levels on a regular basis (Owen et al 2020), which can effectively assist nations in tracking and reporting progress towards the goals of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conserving evolutionary history to safeguard our future: incorporating the Tree of Life into biodiversity policy

Gumbs

Chaudhary

et al. 2021

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Following our failure to fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets, the future of biodiversity rests in the balance. The Convention on Biological Diversity's Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) presents us with the opportunity to preserve Nature's Contributions to People (NCPs) for current and future generations through conserving biodiversity and averting extinction across the Tree of Life. Here we demonstrate that species extinctions can lead to unequal losses of biodiversity depending on their evolutionary history, and call attention to our need to conserve the Tree of Life to maintain its benefits. We highlight two indicators available for adoption in the post-2020 GBF to monitor our progress towards safeguarding the Tree of Life. The Phylogenetic Diversity indicator, adopted by IPBES, can be used to monitor biodiversity's capacity to maintain NCPs. The EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) Index monitors how well we are performing at averting the greatest losses across the Tree of Life by conserving the most distinctive species. By committing to safeguarding the Tree of Life post-2020, we can reduce biodiversity loss and preserve nature's contributions to humanity now and into the future.

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“…To remove ambiguity and orthographical errors in the plant nomenclature, automated standardization of taxonomic names was conducted using the WorldFlora package [18] in R version 4.0.2 [19] (hereafter, R). This package validates the species names against a static version of the World Flora Online (WFO) taxonomic backbone data, which is actively curated by global experts based on The PlantList backbone (http://www.theplantlist.org/) (static since 2013), and therefore provides the most updated and comprehensive taxonomic reference of vascular plants [20]. The list was further cleaned by removing duplicates and synonyms, and the infraspecific taxa and artificially hybridized species were not considered further (n=1677).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

ILORA: A database of alien vascular flora of India

Pant

Patwardhan

Patil

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Plant invasions pose an unprecedented threat to biodiversity and ecosystems at different spatial scales, especially for a biodiversity-rich developing nation like India. While country-level checklists are considered as the first step for effective management of plant invasions, databases having biological and ecological attributes of these plant species are of paramount importance for facilitating research activities and developing policy interventions concerning alien plant invasion in a country or region. Though checklists with the names and basic details of alien plant species are available for India, a database aggregating attributes relevant to the understanding of the invasion continuum is lacking. We have curated data for 13 variables related to ecology, biogeography, introduction history, socio-economy and environmental niche of 1747 alien vascular plant species from 22 national and global sources to produce the Indian Alien Flora Information (ILORA) version 1.0 database. This paper describes the detailed methodology of curating these data along with the logic behind selecting these variables to be included in the database. The database, first of its kind for the Indian alien flora, will provide easy access to high quality data, offer a ready reference to comprehend the existing scenario of alien plant species in the country and provide opportunities to identify, scrutinize and prioritize the management of these species. The database is dynamic and will be continuously updated with the availability of new data. It has the provision for bidirectional information exchange with the users, which will allow increasing the resolution of the database as well as the expansion of its capacity. All data will be associated with the source information and ILORA will encourage users to refer to the primary sources to give the contributors full credit and acknowledgement. The database is, therefore, envisaged to become a nationwide collaborative platform for a wide spectrum of stakeholders involving the scientific community, citizens, and policymakers. ILORA is freely accessible via an online data repository as well as through a dedicated website (https://ilora2020.wixsite.com/ilora2020).

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World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants

Cited by 82 publications

References 68 publications

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity

Conserving evolutionary history to safeguard our future: incorporating the Tree of Life into biodiversity policy

ILORA: A database of alien vascular flora of India

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