Comprehensiveness (including all effectively published names), and particularly the active curation by taxonomic experts ( TENs – Taxonomic Expert Networks) will turn this into a unique, dynamic, living resource. The Taxonomic Backbone aims to provide the most up to date source of scientific plant names and their synonyms: a consensus classification of the world's plants. The first resource is a curated and updatable synonymized checklist of all plant species as well as other taxon categories (families, genera, subspecies, etc.) – the Taxonomic Backbone of the WFO. Backed by the international taxonomic community, the WFO provides two fundamental data resources critical for underpinning botanical research, plant conservation and the sustainable use of plant resources. The WFO portal is a freely available online source of rigorously assembled scientific verified biodiversity data on bryophytes, pteridophytes, gymnosperms and angiosperms. The completion of a full inventory of plant life is vital for protecting threatened species of all kinds of organisms and realizing their full potential to support human needs before many of them become extinct. These plants constitute the basis of most terrestrial ecosystems and hold answers to many of the world's health, social, environmental and economic problems. The majority are flowering plants (calculations centre around 352,000 to 370,000 accepted species Paton & al., 2008 Nic Lughadha & al., 2016), whereas gymnosperms amount to 1090 species (WCSP, 2016), and there are roughly 13,300 species of ferns and fern allies (Hassler, 2020), 12,800 mosses (Crosby & al., 2000), and 7500 hornworts and liverworts (Söderström & al., 2016). ![]() There are an estimated 400,000 species of vascular plants and bryophytes on Earth, with perhaps an additional 10% yet to be discovered. ![]() A first milestone for producing the World Flora Online is to be accomplished by the end of 2020, but the WFO Consortium is committed to continuing the WFO programme beyond 2020 when it will develop its full impact as the authoritative source of information on the world's plant biodiversity. ![]() A strength of the project is that it is led and endorsed by a global consortium of more than 40 leading botanical institutions worldwide. Full credit and acknowledgement will be given to the original sources, allowing users to refer back to the primary data. It will be a first-ever unique and authoritative global source of information on the world's plant diversity, compiled, curated, moderated and updated by an expert and specialist-based community (Taxonomic Expert Networks – “TENs” – covering a taxonomic group such as family or order) and actively managed by those who have compiled and contributed the data it includes. ![]() The project represents an international, coordinated effort by the botanical community to achieve GSPC Target 1, an electronic Flora of all plants. The adoption of an updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2011 provided the essential impetus for the development of the World Flora Online (WFO) project. It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of botanical exploration, taxonomic and, more recently, phylogenetic research throughout the world.
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