At a time of year dominated by year-end lists and countdowns, a team of botanists has released a list of their own which includes the 375,000 plant species existing on Earth and their 1.25 million monikers.
The Plant List was compiled by a team of international researchers from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Gardens, and Missouri Botanical Gardens and is meant to clarify and consolidate the scientific and Latin classifications as well as other synonyms attached to plants over time. As the field of botany grew internationally, plants were named, re-named, and sometimes misidentified as variants based on human error like a misspelling. The Plant List takes all the known names of a specific plant and lists them together with the plant they refer to.
Botanists hope that this concise list will help everyone from urban gardener, to farmer, to researcher hoping to better understand global botany and aid in conservation efforts.
