POWO世界植物名录

Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an international collaborative programme that has as a primary aim to make available digitized data of the world’s flora gathered from the past 250 years of botanical exploration and research. POWO also aims to make freely available electronic data created by different projects but that no longer have an online presence or where data was never made available externally. It delivers information on the taxonomy, identification, images, distribution, traits, threat status, molecular phylogenies and uses of vascular plants worldwide. The data are sourced from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as well as its partners and collaborators who generously contribute data and make it openly accessible on POWO.

Launched in March 2017 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with an initial focus on tropical African Floras was made possible through the generous support of our benefactors, Michel and Hélène David-Weill. POWO’s aim is to empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists, horticulturalists, farmers, gardeners and plant enthusiasts globally. The codebase is open source and Kew supports existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs.

All data incorporated into POWO are attached to the currently accepted name from the WCVP names backbone. Descriptive data published in the past one hundred years are digitized under the name used at the time. Because of continuous research and better insights into how plants are related to each other, plant names have had to be changed and therefore the original name under which the data was published may differ from the name under which it is currently displayed on POWO. Full synonymy is provided in POWO, so it is easy to find the data under any name you search for as well as indicating with each descriptive element the original name under which the data were published.

In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that relevant data can be harvested for research purposes and to be incorporated by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling the POWO data providers to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020.