Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an

online database An online database is a database accessible from a local network or the Internet, as opposed to one that is stored locally on an individual computer or its attached storage (such as a CD). Online databases are hosted on websites, made available as ...

published by the

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 ...

. It was launched in March 2017 with the ultimate aim being "to enable users to access information on all the world's known

seed-bearing plants A spermatophyte (; ), also known as phanerogam (taxon Phanerogamae) or phaenogam (taxon Phaenogamae), is any plant that produces seeds, hence the alternative name seed plant. Spermatophytes are a subset of the embryophytes or land plants. They ...

by 2020". The initial focus was on tropical African Floras, particularly Flora Zambesiaca, Flora of West Tropical Africa and Flora of Tropical East Africa. The database uses the same taxonomical source as Kew's

World Checklist of Selected Plant Families The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (usually abbreviated to WCSP) is an "international collaborative programme that provides the latest peer reviewed and published opinions on the accepted scientific names and synonyms of selected pla ...

, which is the International Plant Names Index, and the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP). POWO contains 1,234,000 global plant names and 367,600 images.

References

Online botany databases Online taxonomy databases . Plant taxonomy Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Databases in the United Kingdom {{botany-stub

See also

References