Peer reviewed research. Published by the Botanical Society of America.
Archives: Recommended Websites
Encyclopedia of Life
A comprehensive biodiversity database that includes plants with information on names, habitat, growing locations, reference articles, photos, and associated relationships. The database is hosted by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
Learning to Identify Plants by Families
An article that introduces you to the basic patterns of identification for seven of the largest and easiest-to-recognize families of plants, which are found worldwide.
Royal Botanic Gardens/Kew Databases
Databases, publications, bibliographies, catalogues and interactive keys from the leading international center of botanical research.
Flora of North America
FNA’s mission statement reads: “FLORA of North America (FNA) is a project undertaken by North American botanists to provide authoritative, up-to-date information on the names, relationships, characteristics, and distributions of the approximately 21,000 species of plants that grow outside of cultivation in North America north of Mexico.” This extensive database of North American plants is organized by family, then down the line by genus and species. The information provided includes a detailed botanical description, citations to selected references, line-drawing images, which can be enlarged to positively identify the plant, and relevant links.
Botanical Society of America
Species 2000
“Species 2000 has the objective of enumerating all known species of organisms on Earth (animals, plants, fungi and microbes) as the baseline dataset for studies of global biodiversity.”
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh – Multisite Search
The data available from this page are extracted from the on-line “Living Collections” and conservation databases of multiple arboreta and botanic gardens. You can simultaneously search as many of these databases as you wish, or select only the North American sites.
USDA Plants Database
This USDA sponsored site is maintained by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Their mission is to provide: “a single source of standardized information about plants. This database focuses on vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. The PLANTS Database includes names, checklists, automated tools, identification information, species abstracts, distributional data,crop information, plant symbols, plant growth data, plant materials information, plant links,references, and other plant information.”
PlantExplorers.com
A site with the ambitious goal of supporting and documenting plant exploration through history and modern times. The bulk of the pages are biographies of the more famous plant hunters of the last few centuries.