Plant Sciences Research Guide

A collection of digitized taxonomic literature from a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries. Includes local collections for Europe, China, Australia, and Brazil.

Scientific names of organisms are not usually known for their entertainment value. They are indispensable for clarity in communication, but most people skip over them with barely a glance. Here I collect those names that are worth a second look.

The EOL team has begun a focused effort to assemble rich content for taxa of particular public interest. We remain committed to bringing you information on all organisms, but need to do our best to serve the information most in demand from our visitors as soon as possible. We are watching the news, and tracking our highest-traffic pages. We have consulted our community of experts to find out which organisms have an immediate impact on humans. These include commercially valuable species, invasive pests and disease organisms, charismatic and familiar animals, popular ornamental plants, newly discovered species, and plants, animals and fungi on which we rely for food, among other groups.

FNA presents for the first time, in one published reference source, information on the names, taxonomic relationships, continent-wide distributions, and morphological characteristics of all plants native and naturalized found in North America north of Mexico. The Flora will appear in 30 volumes and will be available in print and on the Web.

Welcome to ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System! Here you will find authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world. We are a partnership of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican agencies (ITIS-North America); other organizations; and taxonomic specialists. ITIS is also a partner of Species 2000 and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The ITIS and Species 2000 Catalogue of Life (CoL) partnership is proud to provide the taxonomic backbone to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

The Plant List is a working list of all known plant species. It aims to be comprehensive for species of Vascular plant (flowering plants, conifers, ferns and their allies) and of Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts).

The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny).

Many technical terms, names of biological structures, and names of taxa, are formed from Greek and Latin roots. If you are familiar with these roots, you can 'translate' the technical terms into English. One particularly useful example is the names of taxa. The formal taxonomic names for many animal groups (from phylum down to species) are often formed from roots that refer to distinctive features of the animals. When used in pairs, such as in the familiar Latin binomials for genus and species, both the genus and species names are often descriptive.

Algaebase includes 139,106 species and infraspecific names are in the database, 18,324 images, 52,344 bibliographic items, 268,602 distributional records.

This common name look-up lists about 25,000 common names for plants from a number of different languages.
Seeds for most of the plants listed can be purchased from B & T World Seeds.
Many more names can be found using the Common Name search form.

This database contains information on the accepted names, synonyms and alternate states for approximately 40,000 fungal names. Additional information on general distribution and useful literature is also included.

GRIN taxonomic data provide the structure and nomenclature for accessions of the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), part of the National Genetic Resources Program (NGRP) of the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). In GRIN Taxonomy for Plants all families and genera of vascular plants and 52,262 species from throughout the world are represented, especially economic plants and their relatives. Information on scientific and common names, classification, distribution, references, and economic impacts are provided.

The Index contains entries dealing with various aspects of extant and fossil American plants and fungi, including systematics and floristics, morphology, and ecology, as well as economic botany and general botany (publications dealing with botanists, herbaria, etc.). "America" is defined in the broadest possible sense, encompassing land and marine plants and fungi from Greenland to Antarctica. American territory outside this area, e.g., Hawaii, is not included.

ION contains the organism names related data gathered from the scientific literature for Thomson Reuters' Zoological Record® database. Viruses, bacteria and plant names will be added from other Thomson Reuters databases such as BIOSIS Previews®.

The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns and lycophytes. Its goal is to eliminate the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names. The data are freely available and are gradually being standardized and checked. IPNI will be a dynamic resource, depending on direct contributions by all members of the botanical community.

The Taxonomy Database is a curated classification and nomenclature for all of the organisms in the public sequence databases. This currently represents about 10% of the described species of life on the planet.

The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories.

Tropicos, the world’s largest botanical database, contains 1.2 million published names, information on more than 361,000 type specimens (the specimen used to establish the name for a plant species), more than two million distribution records, nearly 660,000 synonyms, over four million specimen records and more than 230,000 plant images. Literature reports on chromosome counts are also included, as well as information on the ways plants have been used by or had an effect on humans.