The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (usually abbreviated to WCSP) was 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 binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, altho ...

and

synonyms A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

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 was available online, allowing searches for the names of families, genera and species, as well as the ability to create checklists. The project traced its history to work done in the 1990s by Kew researcher

Rafaël Govaerts Rafaël Herman Anna Govaerts (born 1968) is a Belgian botanist. He is particularly noted for his work on plant taxonomy. He studied a Bachelor in Science at the European University College Brussels (EHSAL), and since 1994, has worked at the R ...

on a checklist of the genus ''

Quercus An oak is a hardwood tree or shrub in the genus ''Quercus'' of the beech family. They have spirally arranged leaves, often with lobed edges, and a nut called an acorn, borne within a cup. The genus is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisp ...

''. 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 seed plant or spermatophyte (; New Latin ''spermat-'' and Greek ' (phytón), plant), also known as a phanerogam (taxon Phanerogamae) or a phaenogam (taxon Phaenogamae), is any plant that produces seeds. It is a category of embryophyte (i.e. la ...

s were included. Coverage of

monocotyledon Monocotyledons (), commonly referred to as monocots, ( Lilianae '' sensu'' Chase & Reveal) are flowering plants whose seeds contain only one embryonic leaf, or cotyledon. A monocot taxon has been in use for several decades, but with various ranks ...

families was completed and other families were being added. There is a complementary project called the

International Plant Names Index The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) describes itself as "a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns and lycophytes." Coverage of plant names is best at the rank of species and genus. It inclu ...

(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 were automatically added from the IPNI to the WCSP. The WCSP was also one of the underlying databases for

The Plant List The Plant List was a list of botanical names of species of plants created by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden and launched in 2010. It was intended to be a comprehensive record of all known names of plant specie ...

, 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 philanthropy, philanthropist Henry Shaw (philanthropist), Henry Shaw. I ...

, 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 publishi ...

. At the end of October 2022, the WCSP website, together with the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) website, was closed and the data was transferred to the

Plants of the World Online Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an online taxonomic database published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. History Following the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew launched Plants of the World Online i ...

(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