The Plant List

» see theplantlist.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never needed to look up a plant name and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What put this one on the list is a version number that stopped moving. The Plant List sat at 1.1 from September 2013 until the machine serving it went away, and in all those years people kept citing it, because there was nothing better with the same coverage.

It came out of a promise made by governments. In 2002 the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a strategy for plant conservation whose first target was a working list of all known plant species, due by 2010. That is the kind of target that gets written into an agreement by people who will not have to build it. Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden built it.

Version 1 was announced on 29 December 2010, two days before the deadline. It worked by merging checklists that the two institutions and their collaborators already held, then running the merged pile through rules that decided which name was the accepted one and which were synonyms. Where the sources disagreed and the rules could not settle it, the name was published as unresolved rather than quietly picked. Version 1.1 in September 2013 fixed known errors from the first release and folded in a Rosaceae dataset from Edinburgh whose author had died earlier that year.

Then it stopped. Not with an announcement, just with nothing further.

~ the record ~

~ what was actually in it ~

Version 1.1 held 1,293,685 scientific plant names covering vascular plants and bryophytes. Algae and fungi were out of scope and common names were never included, so there was no path from "oak" to anything. Of the total, 350,699 were accepted species names across roughly 640 families and 17,000 genera, and a couple of hundred thousand stayed permanently unresolved.

The unresolved pile is the honest part of the thing. Three centuries of botanists naming the same plant in different countries produces a mess that no merge rule fully cleans up, and the list said so in the data instead of hiding it behind a confident answer. Every record carried a confidence level.

~ the handover ~

World Flora Online was set up in October 2012, before version 1.1 had even shipped, with a revised target from the same treaty: an online flora of all known plants by 2020. Of the four institutions that founded it, two were Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden, so the succession was arranged rather than contested. The Plant List's data became WFO's taxonomic backbone, and from then on the curation happened over there.

That left the original as a read-only monument to itself. The front page eventually grew a notice telling you it had been static since 2013 and pointing at worldfloraonline.org, and underneath the notice the whole searchable list kept working exactly as it had.

~ the long tail ~

A frozen reference work does not stop being used the day it stops being updated, which is the problem. Papers written in 2019 still cited The Plant List for names that WFO had already revised, because the old site was familiar and it answered fast. Taxonomy moves slowly enough that a decade-old snapshot is right most of the time, and wrong in exactly the places where the argument is.

It served that way for thirteen years. Sometime after the start of July 2026 the host stopped accepting connections, and now theplantlist.org resolves to an address that refuses you on both ports. Nothing announced it. A million plant names went quiet the same way they were maintained, which is to say without anyone posting about it.

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