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 In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

and synonyms of selected plant families." Maintained 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 1,10 ...

, it is available online, allowing searches for the names of families, genera and species, as well as the ability to create checklists. The project traces its history to work done in the 1990s by Kew researcher Rafaël Govaerts on a checklist of the genus '' Quercus''. Influenced by the

Global Strategy for Plant Conservation The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) is a program of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity founded in 1999. The GSPC seeks to slow the pace of plant extinction around the world through a strategy of 5 objectives. History The G ...

, the project expanded. , 173 families of

seed plant 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 inc ...

s were included. Coverage of monocotyledon families is complete; other families are being added. There is a complementary project called the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), in which Kew is also involved. The IPNI aims to provide details of publication and does not aim to determine which are accepted species names. After a delay of about a year, newly published names are automatically added from the IPNI to the WCSP. The WCSP is also one of the underlying databases for The Plant List, created by Kew and the

Missouri Botanical Garden The Missouri Botanical Garden is a botanical garden located at 4344 Shaw Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. It is also known informally as Shaw's Garden for founder and philanthropist Henry Shaw. Its herbarium, with more than 6.6 million ...

, which was unveiled in 2010, and subsequently superseded by

World Flora Online World Flora Online is an Internet-based compendium of the world's plant species. Description The World Flora Online (WFO) is an open-access database, launched In October 2012 as a follow-up project to The Plant List, with the aim of publishing a ...

. At the end of October 2022, the WCSP website, together with the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) website will close. The data will be transferred to the Plants of the World Online (POWO) database.

References

External links

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

See also

References

External links