The mission of the Center for Plant Conservation is to “conserve and restore the rare native plants of the United States”. This site describes the center’s programs and publications, but the heart is the National Collection of Endangered Plants database which list descriptions, distributions, habitat and extensive bibliographies on 580 rare North American plants and the member institutions where they are grown.
Archives: Recommended Websites
Biomes, Biogeographical Realms, and Ecoregions
from the World Wildlife Fund. A collection of biodiversity data from 26 major habitat types.
Smithsonian Institution Libraries: The American Seed and Nursery Industry
Features a bibliography of the history of the American Seed and Nursery Industry and their Trade Catalogs and biographies of American Seedsmen and Nurserymen.
Bioimages
A large collection of plant images, mostly woody trees and shrubs, with various browsing methods to find the images. The most useful method is a map of North America divided into bioregions. Each bioregion has an associated list of dominant plants. Created by Steve Baskauf of Vanderbilt University.
National Agriculture Library: AGRICOLA Database
The NAL Catalog (AGRICOLA) provides citations to agricultural literature.
National Agriculture Library
NAL “houses one of the world’s largest and most accessible agricultural information collections and serves as the nexus for a national network of state land-grant and U.S. Department of Agriculture field libraries.”
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.
CBHL – Member Libraries
A partial list of websites of CBHL member libraries listed in alphabetical order.
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.”