WFO (World Flora Online)

The World Flora Online (WFO) is a comprehensive initiative that aims to create an online flora of all known plants. Here are some key details about the WFO:

Scope and Purpose: - The WFO seeks to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation by providing a centralized platform for plant-related information. - It includes 1,614,644 names, covering 377,749 accepted species. Additionally, there are 1,572,290 names associated with content such as 56,371 images, 163,804 descriptions, 36,225 distributions, and 1,572,134 references².

Taxonomic Backbone: - The WFO offers a taxonomic backbone that serves as a foundation for plant classification. - The initial data ingestion into the taxonomic backbone was based on information from The Plant List Version 1.1 (September 2013), which aggregated data from various sources such as the African Plants Database, GrassBase, and more. - Taxonomic specialists actively curate and update the classifications of families, ensuring an up-to-date global consensus classification. - The WFO Consortium encourages botanists worldwide to participate in creating and joining Taxonomic Expert Networks (TENs) to enhance the backbone's accuracy and completeness¹.

Data Availability: - The WFO provides a static copy of the Taxonomic Backbone data for download. This data is available under the Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license. - The latest static version (as of December 22, 2023) is 108MB in size. - When citing the WFO, you can use the following format: "WFO ([Year]): World Flora Online. Version [Year]. [Month]. Published on the Internet; ⁶(http://www.worldfloraonline.org). Accessed on: [Date]." - The DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7460141 represents all versions and always resolves to the latest one¹.

Previous Versions: - Copies of previous static versions are available for citation and archiving purposes. For example: - WFO Taxonomic Backbone (20231222): Version from June 25, 2023, with a size of 105MB ¹. - WFO Taxonomic Backbone (20230625): Version from March 4, 2023, with a size of 103MB ¹.

In summary, the World Flora Online is a valuable resource for botanists, researchers, and conservationists, providing a wealth of plant-related information and fostering collaboration in the field of botany.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/18/2024 (1) An Online Flora of All Known Plants. https://www.worldfloraonline.org/. (2) Download data - World Flora Online. https://www.worldfloraonline.org/downloadData. (3) undefined. http://www.worldfloraonline.org. (4) GitHub - tonito9/flora-datasets: Curated list of datasets on plants .... https://github.com/tonito9/flora-datasets. (5) TRY Plant Trait Database. https://www.try-db.org/TryWeb/Home.php. (6) undefined. http://www.theplantlist.org/1.1/about/.