All posts tagged with kew-gardens

At the end of the twentieth century, the The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and The Australian National Herbarium began collaboration on an ambitious project—to create an online index of names for all of the world’s vascular plants [1].

By combining the data in the nomenclatural indices of these three institutions—namely Index Kewensis, the Gray Card Index, and the Australian Plant Names Index—the collaboration created the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). Hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, today the database includes over 1.6 million records. As part of the provided nomenclatural information, IPNI includes bibliographic details linked to scanned literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and links to taxonomic data through the Plants of the World Online.

Not surprisingly, given its role as a source of scanned literature for the Index, BHL is a vital resource for those working to build and maintain the IPNI database.

“I started working for the International Plant Names Index in 2013,” says Heather Lindon, Plant and Fungal Names Editor at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew . “I need to be able to look up protologues—the original place of publication of plant names and their descriptions. If the earliest place of publication isn’t known, we can use the name search in BHL to try to find it. Since our modern naming system dates to 1753, BHL has a lot of relevant literature for my work. Also, the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature that govern plant names apply to names published in the past, so consulting older works is still relevant for names being published today.”

At the end of the 18th century, French naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière spent two years exploring and collecting plants in the Levant. The expedition ultimately resulted in the publication of a beautifully-illustrated work on the botany of the region, Icones plantarum Syriæ rariorum (“Rare Syrian Plant Images”).

On the 30th June 1817, Joseph Dalton Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk. The second child of William Jackson Hooker, Joseph would, during the course of his life, become a ‘botanical trailblazer’ – traveling across the globe to collect plants and theorizing on plant species diversity and geography.