1. 
2. Help
3. Log In

Home / Plant Anatomy & Taxonomy

Home / Plant Anatomy & Taxonomy / Taxonomy and Plant Classification

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. Go to: KINGDOM IV - Plantae
. A Survey of the Plant Kingdoms.

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.

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!

! James L. Reveal, Norton-Brown Herbarium, University of Maryland: FindIT, Links to Web Sites of Botanical Interest, Dictionaries. Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology - Life Sciences - e.g. Biology, Botany, Cell Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Molecular Biology, Systematics, etc. Excellent!

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).

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.

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.

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).