Cactus Field Number Database

The Cactus Field Number Database is an aggregated, normalized reference of collector field numbers for cactus and succulent species: 59,132 records from 280 collectors across 20 genera, including Ariocarpus, Copiapoa, Lophophora, and Mammillaria, of which 10,273 carry GPS coordinates, each anchored to a cited GBIF occurrence record. Version 1.2 re-verified every coordinate against its cited occurrence and removed legacy coordinates that could not be verified. Version 1.3 adds 293 Jan Novák records recovered from superseded Chilean genus names (Pyrrhocactus, Neoporteria, Thelocephala, Acanthocalycium and allies), resolved to their accepted names following POWO/WCVP. Version 1.4 (final 2026-09-01 state) consolidates duplicate locality records and removes province-level pseudo-precision coordinates. Version 1.5 (2026-09-28) corrects collector attributions against the BCSS Field Collector Query: REP numbers are Werner Reppenhagen’s, HK numbers Horst Kuenzler’s and JDV numbers Kobus Venter’s, and Ralph Peters’s RP numbers are listed separately. REPP is treated as the same number series as REP, as BCSS records, and the 662 duplicate records this exposed are merged. Records link plants to their documented wild-collection localities. The collector field numbers are drawn from publicly published compilations, principally the BCSS Field Number Query maintained by Ralph Martin (fieldnos.bcss.org.uk) and cl-cactus.com compiled by CLudwig, together with the 2001 Ariocarpus field-number compilation by John Miller. Lithops population records incorporate field observations shared by Harald Jainta (Wild Lithops) through a collaboration with rarecactus.com. Geographic coordinates were verified against georeferenced herbarium and occurrence records from GBIF. The contribution of this dataset is the aggregation and structuring layer: cross-source deduplication, canonicalization of locality names, coordinate enrichment, collector-acronym resolution, and linkage to species reference pages. Individual collector field numbers are factual records of who collected a plant and where; they remain the work of the collectors who assigned them and the compilers who published them. This dataset is offered to keep that provenance accessible, not to assert ownership over it. The records follow Darwin Core terms (recordNumber, recordedBy, scientificName, country, locality, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, eventDate). The live searchable version is available at https://rarecactus.com/field-numbers/.