Seed Information Database: taxonomic standardization of 54,856 taxa to World Flora Online or the World Checklist of Vascular Plants

The Seed Information Database (SER, INSR & RBGK 2023) provides user-friendly access to information on seed weight, storage behaviour, germination requirements, and other traits for more than 50,000 plant taxa.

Here I provide a dataset where these taxa were standardized to World Flora Online (Borsch et al. 2020; taxonomic backbone version 2023.12) or the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (Govaerts et al. 2021, version 11) 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 (WFO; WCVP when no acceptable match was found) 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

SER, INSR, RBGK. 2023. Seed Information Database (SID). Society for Ecological Restoration, International Network for Seed Based Restoration and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. https://ser-sid.org/

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.