India Flora Online: taxonomic standardization of 15,443 taxa to World Flora Online

Although India had made major strides in documenting its floristic diversity, this information could not be accessed online in a single source until this deficiency was overcome in the ‘India Flora Online’ database (Sankara Rao & Deepak Kumar 2024). The database is the only initiative of its kind presenting the flora of India that is backed by both herbarium collection and field data. The database was developed by the Herbarium JCB, Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) located in Bangalore. Here I provide a dataset where the taxa 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). Taxa 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. Where no acceptable matches were suggested through direct or fuzzy matching, I manually checked for acceptable matches online from the World Flora Online website and documented matches that I deemed acceptable (these were flagged as ‘WorldFlora_online’ in the ‘Match’ column). References Sankara Rao K & Deepak Kumar. 2024. India Flora Online. Herbarium JCB, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. https://indiaflora-ces.iisc.ac.in 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 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.