Experts from Kew Gardens in London (Great Britain) and the Missouri Botanical Garden (USA) have produced the most comprehensive botanical database created to date , including a list of 1.25 million plant names. The objective is to solve one of the basic problems of botany: to determine which name corresponds to each species. For many years, the same species have been labeled with different names in different countries, which has made their identification difficult. "Imagine trying to find out everything that has been published about a plant: what chemicals it contains, whether it is poisonous or not, where it is found," explains Alan Paton of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. "To find that information, one has to know all the scientific names that have been given to it."
In the new list, available online at www.theplantlist.com, there are more than a million scientific names, of which 300,000 are accepted names for plant species , 480,000 are synonyms of the previous ones, and the rest have not yet been identified. The longest name on the list is Ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergentulum . And the shortest name is Poa fax .
One in five known plant species is currently in danger of extinction , according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and invasive species are your biggest enemies.
