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Home / Helpful Databases and Glossaries / Databases focused on Botany and Biology

Home / Helpful Databases / Databases focused on Botany and Biology / Databases of Technical Terms

Academic Press Limited: The Dictionary of Cell Biology. Also available via http://www.mblab.gla.ac.uk/dictionary/. More than 6500 records!

Phil A. Arneson, Dept. of Plant Pathology, Cornell University, Ithaka, NY: On-Line Glossary of Technical Terms in Plant Pathology. Each entry consists of a term (in bold), a definition of the term, and a number in parentheses, indicating the source of the definition. The pencil icon will give you a drawing, and the camera icon will give you a photograph. Clicking on the speaker icon will give you the pronunciation of the term. Excellent!

BioTech: Life Science Dictionary. This free resource is still very much under construction. Currently, most of 8300+ terms deal with biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, cell biology and genetics, as well as some terms relating to ecology, limnology, pharmacology, toxicology and medicine. Excellent!

ForestWorld.com, Inc., Colchester, VT: Databasis and Directories.

John W. Kimball and/or Wm C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Iowa: Kimball´s Biology Pages. This page consist of a list of topics, arranged alphabetically, of biological terms. The terms are mostly from the areas of molecular and cellular biology. Each item may include a definition, underlined links to other definitions, or links to "mini" essays on the topic.

Anthony J. Martin, Geosciences Program, Emory University: Ichnology Terms Pronounciation and Definition Guide. Audio clips of "latinized" paleontology terms, recorded in AIF format for Macintosh, and links to related resources.

Gilbert J. Muth, Pacific Union College, Angwin, CA: Glossary, Diagrams, and Photos (under construction). Part of the lecture notes "Biological Foundations".

Home / Helpful Databases / Databases focused on Botany and Biology / Botanical Nomenclature Databases

Plant Biology 260 at the University of Illinois: Plant Biology 260 introduces the principles and methods of identifying, naming, and classifying flowering plants. It includes a survey of selected flowering plant families and provides information on their interrelationships. The links provided in the Lecture Syllabus. lead to supplementary information offered by other on-line systematic courses at other universities.

International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Tokyo Code). Adopted by the Fifteenth International Botanical Congress, Yokohama, August-September 1993. Electronic version of the original English text. The www version is available from the web server of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum of Berlin-Dahlem, Germany.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium: International Plant Names Index (IPNI). IPNI is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants. 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.

Dan Nicolson, Department of Botany, Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution: Conserved plant names. proposals and disposals. In 1950, the International Botanical Congress founded the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT), which initiated the journal Taxon. All proposals for scientific names are now published in Taxon for conservation or rejection. This site provides an index to the names proposed for conservation or rejection since the first proposals in 1892. Search by family, genus or species name, plant group, etc.

RONALD H. PETERSEN & KAREN W. HUGHES, Mycology Lab, University of Tennessee: A GUIDE TO BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE. Superbly done!

Ronald H. Petersen, Mycology Lab, University of Tennessee, The Tennessee Tutorial on Botanical Nomenclature: CONVENTIONAL SHORTHAND SYMBOLS IN BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE

Ronald H. Petersen, Mycology Lab, University of Tennessee, The Tennessee Tutorial on Botanical Nomenclature: GLOSSARY OF -ONYMS AS APPLIED TO BOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE

James L. Reveal, Norton-Brown Herbarum, University of Maryland: Indices Nominum supragenericorum Plantarum Vascularium. Alphabetical listing by genera of validly published suprageneric names. The list contains more than 5680 names.

ScaleNet, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): Glossary of systematics and nomenclature terms.

Home / Helpful Databases / Databases focused on Botany and Biology / Taxonomy and Plant Classification Databases

B & T World Seeds, France: Common Names Look-up. This is a browsable name list of about 25,000 common plant names and its scientific equivalent.

The Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), University of California at Berkeley: Web Lift to Taxa. This NEW version of the UCMP Web Lift to Taxa breaks the long table of the old version into several shorter lists. See also The UCMP Express Web Lift.

Peter D. Bostock, Queensland Herbarium, Department of Environment, Queensland, Australia: TRANSLAT. Pagina domestica linguae Latinae botanices, computer translation of botanical latin. TRANSLAT, a downloadable free-ware program, uses indexed on-disk databases of verbs, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, phrases and adverbs, (including conjunctions and prepositions), to match stems and terminations (flexions or endings), or the whole word, if indeclinable, of botanical Latin words to provide both a literal/figurative English meaning, and an optional associated statement of the grammar. Also accessable via http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2821/index.html

Phil Cantino and Gar Rothwell, Department of Environmental and Plant Biology, Ohio University, Athens: PBIO 691 Graduate Seminar Series, Phylogenetic Taxonomy. You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to see some of these notes. "Phylogenetic taxonomy" is an alternative system of taxonomy and nomenclature that was first proposed by Kevin de Queiroz and Jacques Gauthier. It differs from the current "Linnaean" system in linking names explicitly to clades rather than to arbitrary ranks such as family and order. Worth checking out: Helpful Background Literature.

! F.M. Cardillo & T.S. Samuels, Department of Biology, Manhattan College and the College of Mt. St. Vincent: WHITTAKER FIVE KINGDOM SYSTEM (1978) Plant Classification. Chapters include: KINGDOM I - Monera
KINGDOM II - Protoctista
KINGDOM III - Fungi
KINGDOM IV - Plantae
.

Gerald (Gerry) Carr, Botany Department, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu: Vascular Plant Family Access Page. This is a collection of descriptions and captioned images of flowering plant families (magnolias, lilies, etc.) and non-flowering plant families (cycads, conifers, ferns and fern allies). The images are all in color and are 400 x 600, 600 x 400, or 400 x 400 pixels in size. More than 225 families are represented among the several hundred images in this category.

Christopher J. Earle, University of Washington, Seattle: The Gymnosperm Database. You may enter the taxonomic tree at the highest level (order or family) and then navigate to the species. At each level, information on the taxon at hand is provided, along with bibliographic citations that will take you to more detailed information about the species.

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Multisite Living Collections Searches. The data available in these searches are extracted from the on-line Living Collections databases at The Royal Horticultural Society (UK), World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Threatened Plants), The Sir Harold Hillier Gardens and Arboretum (UK), Holden Arboretum (USA), Arnold Arboretum (USA), Cornell Plantations (USA), Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Gardens (USA), The New York Botanical Garden (USA) and The Desert Botanical Garden (USA).

Douglas J. Eernisse, Department of Biological Science, California State University, Fullerton: About Hierarchies.

Rob Fensome, Andrew MacRae, and Graham Williams, Project of the Geological Survey of Canada (Atlantic): Dinoflagellate Classification Database (DINOFLAJ). DINOFLAJ is a database system containing a current classification of fossil and living dinoflagellates down to generic rank, and an index of fossil dinoflagellates at generic, specific, and infraspecific ranks.

Andrew N Gagg & Roger Whitehead: BABEL. A bibliography and source list to works in numerous European languages for the vernacular names of European wild plants.

The Harvard University Herbaria: The Botanical Authors Database. The authority table of botanical authors make use of the internationally accepted standards to verify the entry of author names in the type specimen and Gray Card Index databases in the Harvard University Herbaria. In addition to the names of authors included in Brummitt and Powell (1992), the database also includes botanical authors who published only at infraspecific ranks and who therefore were not included in the earlier Index Kewensis Supplements, and additional authors who published names that were missed by Index Kewensis. Additional information is provided for many authors, such as the country(s) where the person lived or worked, the taxonomic group(s) of special interest, and the herbaria where the author´s specimens can be found.

IAPT-MARY SUPRAGENERIC NAMES DATABASE: The Indices Nominum Supragenericorum Plantarum Vascularium Project is supported by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy and the Norton-Brown Herbarium of the University of Maryland. Select database to search: INDEX NOMINUM SUPRAGENERICORUM PLANTARUM VASCULARIUM, INDEX NOMINUM FAMILIARUM PLANTARUM VASCULARIUM, (the concordance of family names, INDEX NOMINUM FAMILIARUM PLANTARUM VASCULARIUM, systems of classification of extant vascular plant families, and INDEX NOMINUM FAMILIARUM PLANTARUM VASCULARIUM, Phylogenetic systems of classification of Magnoliophyta.
The data are preliminary. Except for family and ordinal names, the search has concentrated on works published prior to 1860.

ICAL-Botany, hosted and maintained by the Missouri Botanical Garden: The Interactive Collections Availability List. Here you will find a list of botanical collections that are either: orphaned and available for adoption by an institution, or underutilized and in need of further investigation by research students and scientists. ICAL-Botany also allows you to notify the world-wide botanical community through an automatic distribution list that you have a collection that either needs a new home or needs further study. Links worth checking out: Orphaned Collections Needs Home Now! Maintained by the Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), California at Berkeley.

Index Nominum Genericorum (ING). The ING, a collaborative project of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and the Smithsonian Institution, was initiated in 1954 as a compilation of generic names published for all organisms covered by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Current work on the ING is supported by the Smithsonian Institution, IAPT, and the University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands. The content of the database was developed over a 40-year period by the efforts of more than 100 collaborators. Enter a generic name in the ING Generic Name Query Form. Search by the full spelling of the name or if you are uncertain you can use a wild card search by entering a string of letters followed by an asterisk (e.g., Asteranth*).

International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI): IOPI manages a series of cooperative international projects that aim to create databases of plant taxonomic information. IOPI Database of Plant Databases (DPD). DPD is a global list of plant databases, to tell you who is putting together what data and where.

International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI): IOPI manages a series of cooperative international projects that aim to create databases of plant taxonomic information. The Global Plant Checklist Project. A Global Plant Checklist, encompassing about 300,000 vascular plant species and over 1,000,000 names, is IOPI's first priority. Eventually, the Checklist will also include non-vascular plants (mosses and liverworts, and even lichens and algae if they have not been dealt with elsewhere). A provisional Checklist is in operation.

International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI): IOPI manages a series of cooperative international projects that aim to create databases of plant taxonomic information. The Species Plantarum Project (SPP). SPP is a long term project to record essential taxonomic information on vascular plants worldwide. It is being published in hardcopy as "Flora of the World". It includes accepted names and synonyms with places of publication and types, short descriptions of all taxa from family to infraspecific rank, keys, distributions, references to literature comments, etc.

International Plant Names Index (IPNI). IPNI is a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants. Its goal is to eliminate the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names.

The Institute for Scientific Computation (ISC), College of Science, Texas A&M University: Flowering Plant Gateway. The selection options at the base of this page provide various paths for exploration or comparison of flowering plant classification. Family-level data include links to WWW information for those families for which information is available. This "gateway" system - soon to include all vascular plants - is under constant revision. Internet information for a given family can be obtained by using the family finder. Excellent!

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: RBG, KEW DATABASES.
Vascular Plant Families and Genera, Authors of Plant Names and DNA Databases (Index of angiosperm DNA amounts). See also R.K. Brummitt, IBS: Vascular Plant Families and Genera. The data is © Copyright The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

University of Maryland at College Park Libraries: Plants: Common and Scientific Names: A Guide to Sources. This site is a selected list of information sources for plant names. The topics range from plants in general, to specific categories such as exotic plants and trees, shrubs and vines. The areas covered include: taxonomy, classification and nomenclature of plants.

The Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri: w³TROPICOS. The Missouri Botanical Garden announces live access to its TROPICOS Nomenclatural database system through the World Wide Web. Information is available for over 750,000 scientific plant names. The records frequently have links to other associated names, types, synonymy, and bibliographic references. Enter a scientific name in the search engine to obtain current information on the name, its place of publication, type, and other information about the plant.

NASA, Earth Observatory. The purpose of NASA's Earth Observatory is to provide a freely-accessible publication on the Internet where the public can obtain new satellite imagery and scientific information about our home planet. The focus is on Earth's climate and environmental change. By activating the glossary mode, you can view each page with special terms highlighted that, when selected, will take you to the appropriate entry in the glossary. Use the full-text search engine, or go to: Data and Images. To view a particular dataset, select one of the data types in this column, e.g. Vegetation.

NOAA Paleoclimatology Program, WDC for Paleoclimatology: Modern and Fossil Pollen Data. All data in the WDC-A archive is contributed by research scientists. See also:
What´s New in the Global Pollen Database. New data on paleobotanical pollen cores and pollen distribution are added to this US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Paleoclimatology Program site regularly. Users can browse a list of newly-acquired data and click links to detailed information on the pollen data from each site.

Ray Phillips, Information Technology Services, Colby College, Waterville, Maine: World Wide Flowering Plant Family Identification. Select the characters that are present in the specimen being identified and press "Submit". Database is part of "Biology 211: Flowering Plant Taxonomy", an introduction to the principles and practice of flowering plant taxonomy.

Ray Phillips, Information Technology Services, Colby College, Waterville, Maine: Biology 211: Flowering Plant Taxonomy. An introduction to the principles and practice of flowering plant taxonomy. Visit the Guide to Flowering Plant Family Recognition. This is a descriptive and photographic tour of some families in the Magnoliophyta (60 flowering plant families).

PlantAmerica: PlantLink. The most comprehensive URL search engine for plant related web sites available; pre-programed with accurate nomenclature. PlantLink utilizes METAFIND´s advanced search capabilities to cross reference multiple search engines. Now with over 80,000 plant names. Excellent!

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): PLANTS Database. The PLANTS database focuses on vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. It includes names, checklists, automated tools, identification information, species abstracts, distributional data, crop information, plant symbols, plant growth data, plant materials information, plant links, references, and other plant information.

The Field, Penpol, Lostwithiel, Cornwall: Plants For A Future - Database Search, and The Species Database. A resource and information centre for edible and other useful plants. Plants for a Future is a project based in Devon and Cornwall which seeks to gather together and disseminate information on the many useful properties of plants, particularly those plants which are less common in today's society. The database contains over 7000 species.

Richard Stafursky: World Species List - Animals Plants Microbes (still under construction).

Vincent Tandart, l´Université François Rabelais, Tours, France, & Pascal Gantet: The plant kingdom. In French.

NSF, Harvard University Herbaria, and the University of California, Davis: TreeBASE. A database of phylogenetic knowledge. TreeBASE contains only studies of green plants. Explore the search engine.
See: Morell, V. 1996. TreeBASE: the roots of phylogeny. Science 273:569.

Natural Resources Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture, (USDA) Washington, D.C.: PLANTS. PLANTS was created to replace the National List of Scientific Names (NLSPN) published by the National Resources Conservation Service - NRCS (formerly the Soil Conservation Service). PLANTS is a database which provides a single source of general information about the plant kingdom to researchers and other people interested in plants. The standardized information, such as common names and symbols, permits managers and scientists across disciplines and agencies to freely exchange plant-related information, because they are using the same names and symbols.

The Virtual Mirror, Inc. (Garden Web): HortiPlex Plant Database. The HortiPlex database contains plant images and data as well as links to information sources, images and vendors at other sites. There is also a nomenclature database which provides botanical information on each taxon.

L. Watson Albany, Australia, and M. J. Dallwitz CSIRO Entomology, Canberra, Australia (page hosted by DELTA): The Families of Flowering Plants. This is a package of automated descriptions of Angiosperm families. It incorporates the classification of Flowering Plant Families presented by The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group APG) in Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 85, 531–553 (1998).

Home / Helpful Databases / Databases focused on Botany and Biology / Trees

The Forest Biology and Dendrology Educational Sites, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg: Leaf and Twig ID Keys. Do you have a leaf or twig and no idea what species it is? Try the key and figure it out by simply answering the questions and matching your sample to the pictures.

Leopold Dippel, Darmstadt, 1889-1893, Part 1 -3; (web site hosted by Kurt Stüber, Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung, Collection of historic and classical biology books): Handbuch der Laubholzkunde. Dicot trees and shrubs in Germany (in German).

ForestWorld.com, Inc., Colchester, VT: Woods of the World Online. Detailed information on up to 910 wood species and products. Examine the common names, common uses, distribution, environmental profile, physical and woodworking properties, and mechanical values of all these woods. Imagine a wood book with 3,000 pages of text. Free of charge, but registration procedure required.

Thomas W. Kimmerer, Department of Forestry, University of Kentucky, Lexington: TreeWeb. This is actually a learning tool for students in forestry and natural resources courses. The Taxonomy page is the main gateway to tree descriptions and lists of species, genera and families. Database access to more than 800 species coming in January.

Leonard Miller, California: The Ancient Bristlecone Pine.

Palaeobotanical Research Group, Münster, Westfälische Wilhelms University, Münster, Germany. History of Palaeozoic Forests, THE EARLY FORESTS AND THE PROGYMNOSPERMS. Link list page with rankings and brief explanations. Images of Archaeopteris, Tetraxylopteris schmidtii, Callixylon, Archaeopteris gaspensis, Archaeopteris halliana, Archaeopteris hibernica.

The New York Botanical Garden, Herbarium: Catalog of North American Gymnosperms. Approximately 10,000 records of gymnosperms (without cycadopytes and gnetophytes) from North America north of Mexico are available for searching and are arranged according to family.

Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN), and The Ohio Historical Society (OHS): What tree is it? This web site will lead you through qualities of leaves and fruits from the common trees of Ohio. During the selection process, click on the image that closest resembles your sample.

Harold Pellett, Nancy Rose and Mervin Eisel, Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Department of Horticultural Science, University of Minnesota: The Right Tree Handbook. Descriptions with photographs for commonly planted temperate zone trees. This handbook was actually prepared to describe and illustrate some possible plants to use in landscaping under and near power lines. Large trees are also described to make the book a more complete listing of woody landscape plants.

John Shane, School of Natural Resources, George D. Aiken Center, University of Vermont, Burlington: Dendrology. The goals of this course are to identify trees and important shrubs (by sight), and to identify the most important silvical characteristics (i.e., range, tolerance, site requirements, etc.) of these species.

TreeGuide in association with PlantFind.com: The Natural History of Trees. u!

Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, "Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte", newly edited by Moritz Willkomm, about 1887; (web site hosted by Kurt Stüber, Max-Planck-Institut für Züchtungsforschung, Collection of historic and classical biology books): Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenreichs nach dem Linné'schen System. In German. With 54 colored plates (650 figures)!

Instituut voor Bos- en Natuuronderzoek (IBN-DLO), Wageningen Agricultural University: DRYAD - a database of trees. This searchable database contains 958 species and cultivars selected for use in the urban environment. The site is searchable by botanical name or by characteristics, including tree types, size, growth rate, leaf flushing period, leaf colour in summer, leaf colour in autumn, blooming season, and flower color.

YAHOO: Science > Biology > Botany > Plants > Trees.

Home / Helpful Databases / Databases focused on Botany and Biology / Palynology Databases

Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge: Catalogue of pollen types. Low-resolution and higher-resolution stand-alone images and brief explanations.

! Owen Kent Davis, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson: Catalog of Internet Pollen and Spore Images. Excellent!

J. Jansonius, Institute of Sedimentology and Petroleum Geology, Calgary, & L.V. Hills: Jansonius & Hill´s Catalogue This site demonstrate the use of the genera file of fossil palynomorphs on the World Wide Web. It is a card index of great value to those studying fossil pollen and spores and gives descriptive detail and a simple drawing of most known taxa of these fossils.

W. Punt, S. Blackmore, S. Nilsson and A. Le Thomas (a project of the Working Group on Palynological Terminology, under the auspices of the International Federation of Palynological Societies (IFPS). Second and revised edition by Peter Hoen, Department of Palaeobotany & Palynology, University of Utrecht: Glossary of Pollen and Spore Terminology. The objective of the project has been to provide a concise manual of terminology that can be used to clarify the communication of information concerning pollen grains and spores.