World Flora Online
Type of siteEncyclopedia
Available inEnglish
Created byRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden
URLabout.worldfloraonline.org
LaunchedOctober 2012
Current statusActive

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 an online flora of all known plants by 2020.[1] It is a project of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, with goal of halting the loss of plant species worldwide by 2020. It is developed by a collaborative group of institutions around the world in response to the 2011–2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC)'s updated Target 1: to produce "an online flora of all known plants".

An accessible flora of all known plant species was considered a fundamental requirement for plant conservation. It provides a baseline for the achievement and monitoring of other targets of the strategy. The previous target of GSPC was achieved in 2010 with The Plant List.[2][3] WFO was conceived in 2012 by an initial group of four institutions; the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.[4] In all, 36 institutions are involved in the production.[3]

World Flora Online developed WFO's Plant List (wfoplantlist.org) to replace the traditional Plant List v.1.1 (plantlist.org).[5] In 2024, Pl@ntNet joined the WFO consortium.[6]

See also

References

  1. WFO 2019.
  2. TPL 2013.
  3. Miller & Ulate 2017.
  4. MBG 2019.
  5. Team, W. F. O. (2021). "World Flora Online gets a New Look, a major data update, and launches the WFO plant list". Taxon. 70 (6): 1418–1419. Bibcode:2021Taxon..70.1418.. doi:10.1002/tax.12557. ISSN 1996-8175.
  6. CIRAD (November 4, 2024). "Le Cirad rejoint le consortium international World Flora Online". CIRAD (in French).

Bibliography