International Organization for Plant Information, Global Plant Checklist Project

The International Organization for Plant Information (IOPI) manages a series of cooperative international projects that aim to create and link databases of plant taxonomic information. The Global Plant Checklist is one such project. A Global Plant Checklist, encompassing about 300,000 vascular plant species and over 1,000,000 names, is the first priority. Eventually, the Checklist will include nonvascular plants (mosses, lichens, algae, and liverworts). It will serve as a taxonomic backbone on which users can append their more specialized information. IOPI's broad strategy in preparing the Checklist is to merge data sources held by member organizations (e.g. databases, floras, monographic treatments, and herbarium data) into a computer-accessible format. The merged data will be edited for consistency by a worldwide network of specialists. The Checklist will become increasingly useful through refinements from taxonomic editing and the incorporation of additional data sets. It will be available as both a dynamic database and periodic hard copy publication. The Global Plant Checklist project is organized by the IOPI Checklist Committee (CLC) which developed a detailed project plan, which is being revised. Planning of computer system resources for this and other IOPI projects is done by the IOPI Information System Committee (ISC). A list of data definitions for the initial edition of the checklist was prepared by the Data Definition and Standards working group (DDS) of the CLC. An extensive data model for the management of checklist information has been developed by the ISC since 1993. Data URL: "http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/iopi/iopihome.htm" Information taken from "http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/iopi/iopihome.htm"