A dataset containing the most relevant taxonomic
information of plant names stored in the World Checklist of Vascular Plants,
taxonomic backbone including vascular plants (i.e. licophytes,
ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms) and all taxonomic levels
(i.e. infra-species, species, genus, family and so on).
Bryophytes are not included.
The original backbone was
edited aiming to standardize the notation across
backbones in plantRdata. Many columns in the original
source that were not essential for the process of taxon name
checking were removed and most of them were renamed. Duplicated
scientific names (i.e. taxon name + author) whose taxon status
were not accepted were also removed to avoid possible problems in
the taxon name matching process.
The original column with
the taxonomic status was simplified to macth other backbones and
have the following categories: accepted, synonyms, unplaced
and blank (i.e. empty status). Original categories 'Artificial
Hybrid', 'Local Biotype' and 'Orthographic' were converted to
'accepted', 'accepted' and 'synonym', excepted when the
nomenclatural remarks suggested otherwise. Other original
categories (i.e. Illegitimate, Invalid and Misapplied) were left
as blanks. All original categories were moved to the
nomenclatural remarks column for consistency. For WCVP, the
original nomenclatural remarks was very rich information but it
had to be simplified to facilitate the understanding of the
output of name matching process to the final users.
data(wcvpNames)An object of class data.frame with 12 columns and
over 1.4 million rows.
Govaerts, R., Nic Lughadha, E., Black, N. et al. (2021). The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. Sci. Data 8, 215. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6
Govaerts, R. (2023). The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP). Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/6h8ucr
Last update/change of the downloaded backbone (year-month-day):
2024-05-21.