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A working flora

Plants

56,125 species across 612 families. Every one has at least three openly licensed photographs, a name accepted by World Flora Online, and a source for every claim on its page. Filter by what the data can actually back: growth habit, climate, native region, and how much evidence the page carries.

Species 56,125 Families 612 Native range 53,156 Flowering 15,523 Climate envelope 40,197 Herbarium sheet 52,653
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56,125 species, 8,208 genera, 612 families. Type two letters.

Best documented

56,125 species

By family

612 families

What this is

and what it is not

This is a working reference, not a catalogue of everything. A species appears here only when we can put at least three commercially licensed photographs on the page and name an accepted botanical source for it. Roughly three quarters of the photographs on iNaturalist carry a NonCommercial licence, and this site is commercial, so we cannot use them. That costs us a great many pictures and a great many species. We would rather have 56,125 pages that can defend themselves than four hundred thousand that cannot.

The filters follow the same rule. Growth habit is Kew’s lifeform description, folded into a controlled vocabulary by a fixed rule; climate and native region are Kew’s World Checklist; the evidence filters are simply whether the page carries that thing. 45,796 species carry a habit, 49,976 a climate, 53,156 a native range. Where a species has none of a given field, it is absent from that filter rather than assigned a plausible guess. There is no flower-colour or sunlight filter, because we hold no such data for the flora and will not invent it.

Every accepted species in World Flora Online is still reachable, all 382,386 of them, through its genus. The ones we cannot document appear there as rows carrying their name, their authority and the honest count of how many usable photographs we could actually find, which is usually none. They do not get a page, because a page with nothing on it is not a kindness to anybody.