
A Quest to Document the World’s Flowering Plants - sohkamyung
https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/08/14/a-quest-to-document-the-worlds-flowering-plants/
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pvaldes
All the known species of flowering plants are documented. By definition there
is an holotype and a paper describing it, but often is a pain to unbury the
info. It happens all the time in taxonomy; lots of old documents are not in
digital format other are in a different country and you need to lend books and
journals in other countries or to ask for obscure papers on forums. Some
species are forgotten except by maybe ten people in the planet able to
differenciate it.

This is a quest to put photos of all the species in one single place, but 1)
there are a lot of digital herbariums around yet promoted by universities and
2) this is a battle that google won long time ago.

Simply, this is a too big goal for two people only, and there is not need to
duplicate efforts in another page like this. Just correcting and keeping trace
of the everchanging scientific names would need an entire team of experts. You
just can't build a "wikipedia level" webpage alone.

Would be much better to use their resources improving the red lists of
endangered flora for example.

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have_faith
Unfortunately their website
([http://floraoftheworld.org/](http://floraoftheworld.org/)) seems to be down.
The wayback machine has some snapshots:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180329231424/http://floraofthe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180329231424/http://floraoftheworld.org/)

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RobotCaleb
What a cool project to spend your life on.

