Species documented in a global study of seed dormancy in space and time: taxonomic standardization of 12,743 species to World Flora Online

Zhang et al. (2022) compiled global distribution records for seed dormancy of 12,743 species and their phylogeny to explore the biogeographic patterns, environmental drivers, and evolutionary transitions between seed dormancy and nondormancy.

Here I provide a dataset where these species were standardized to World Flora Online (Borsch et al. 2020; taxonomic backbone version 2023.12) by matching names with those in the Agroforestry Species Switchboard (Kindt et al. 2025; version 4). Species for which no matches could be found were standardized with the WorldFlora package (Kindt 2020), using similar R scripts and the same taxonomic backbone data as those used to standardize species names for the Switchboard.

Additional fields indicate whether a species was flagged as a tree in the Switchboard, and the lifeform obtained from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (Govaerts et al. 2021, version 11).

References

Zhang, Y., Liu, Y., Sun, L., Baskin, C.C., Baskin, J.M., Cao, M. and Yang, J. (2022), Seed dormancy in space and time: global distribution, paleoclimatic and present climatic drivers, and evolutionary adaptations. New Phytol, 234: 1770-1781. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.18099

Borsch, T., Berendsohn, W., Dalcin, E., Delmas, M., Demissew, S., Elliott, A., Fritsch, P., Fuchs, A., Geltman, D., Güner, A., Haevermans, T., Knapp, S., le Roux, M.M., Loizeau, P.-A., Miller, C., Miller, J., Miller, J.T., Palese, R., Paton, A., Parnell, J., Pendry, C., Qin, H.-N., Sosa, V., Sosef, M., von Raab-Straube, E., Ranwashe, F., Raz, L., Salimov, R., Smets, E., Thiers, B., Thomas, W., Tulig, M., Ulate, W., Ung, V., Watson, M., Jackson, P.W. and Zamora, N. (2020), World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants. TAXON, 69: 1311-1341. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12373

Roeland Kindt, Ilyas Siddique, Ian Dawson, Innocent John, Fabio Pedercini, Jens-Peter B. Lilleso, Lars Graudal. 2025. The Agroforestry Species Switchboard, a global resource to explore information for 107,269 plant species. bioRxiv 2025.03.09.642182; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.09.642182  

Govaerts, R., Nic Lughadha, E., Black, N. et al. The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. Sci Data 8, 215 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6

Kindt, R. 2020. WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data. Applications in Plant Sciences 8(9): e11388. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11388

Funding

The development of this dataset was supported by the Darwin Initiative to project DAREX001 of Developing a Global Biodiversity Standard certification for tree-planting and restoration, by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative through the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ethiopia to the Provision of Adequate Tree Seed Portfolio project in Ethiopia, by the Bezos Earth Fund to the Quality Tree Seed for Africa in Kenya and Rwanda project and by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) to the regional tree seed programme on The Right Tree for the Right Place for the Right Purpose in Africa.