Chapter Plant Name Resources

Plant names are the key to communicating and managing information about plants. This paper considers how providers of high quality technical plant name information can better meet the requirements non-botanical audiences who also rely on plant names for elements of their work. The International Plant Name Index, World Checklist of Selected Plant Families and The Plant List are used as examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of plant name resources from a non-expert user’s perspective. The above resources can be thought of as botanists pushing data at audiences. Without closer engagement with users, however, there is a limit to their relevance and impact. The need to cover common names is a frequent criticism of existing resources. The Medicinal Plant Names Services (MPNS, www.kew.org/mpns) is an example of how plant name resources can be adapted to better address the needs of a non-botanical audience. Some of the major challenges are outlined and solutions suggested

Towards a new online species-information system for legumes

The need for scientists to exchange, share and organise data has resulted in a proliferation of biodiversity research-data portals over recent decades. These cyber-infrastructures have had a major impact on taxonomy and helped the discipline by allowing faster access to bibliographic information, biological and nomenclatural data, and specimen information. Several specialised portals aggregate particular data types for a large number of species, including legumes. Here, we argue that, despite access to such data-aggregation portals, a taxon-focused portal, curated by a community of researchers specialising on a particular taxonomic group and who have the interest, commitment, existing collaborative links, and knowledge necessary to ensure data quality, would be a useful resource in itself and make important contributions to more general data providers. Such an online species-information system focused on Leguminosae (Fabaceae) would serve useful functions in parallel to and different from international data-aggregation portals. We explore best practices for developing a legume-focused portal that would support data sharing, provide a better understanding of what data are available, missing, or erroneous, and, ultimately, facilitate cross-analyses and direct development of novel research. We present a history of legume-focused portals, survey existing data portals to evaluate what is available and which features are of most interest, and discuss how a legume-focused portal might be developed to respond to the needs of the legume-systematics research community and beyond. We propose taking full advantage of existing data sources, informatics tools and protocols to develop a scalable and interactive portal that will be used, contributed to, and fully supported by the legume-systematics community in the easiest manner possible

A review of issues of nomenclature and taxonomy of Hypericum perforatum L. and Kew's Medicinal Plant Names Services

Objectives To review which names are used to refer to Hypericum perforatum L. in health regulation and medicinal plant references, and the potential for ambiguity or imprecision. Key findings Structured searches of Kew's Medicinal Plant Names Services Resource, supplemented with other online bibliographic resources, found that the scientific name Hypericum perforatum L. is used consistently in the literature, but variation between subspecies is rarely considered by researchers. Research is still published using only the common name ?St John's wort? despite it being imprecise; at least 80 other common names are also used for this plant in multiple languages. Summary Ambiguous and alternative plant names can lead to ineffective regulation, misinterpretation of literature, substitution of raw material or the failure to locate all published research. Kew's Medicinal Plant Names Services (MPNS) maps all names used for each plant in medicinal plant references onto current taxonomy, thereby providing for disambiguation and comprehensive access to the regulations and references that cite that plant, regardless of the name used. MPNS also supplies the controlled vocabulary for plant names now required for compliance with a new standard (Identification of Medicinal Products, IDMP) adopted by medicines regulators worldwide

Interpreting materia medica. A case study on Ioannes Archiatrus [version 2; peer review: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Background Premodern medical texts are an invaluable source for scholars from humanities and sciences. However, they are usually not accessible as few scientists with an interest in premodern materia medica are also qualified philologists. Therefore, a balance has to be struck to translate these texts while preserving information on how reliable we believe a given translation to be. In this paper, we conduct a case study on the vernacular version of Ioannes archiatrus. Methods The present study forms part of the output of a multidisciplinary Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award combining humanities and sciences. We deployed a multi-layer tagging system to systematise pharmaceutical terminology and to translate these terms while providing confidence factors for individual words. In a second step, we used AntConc, a freeware concordance software, to analyse our primary source and visualise patterns in the text. Results Our methodology created a readable text that made it possible for the reader to check confidence factors. It also allows our translation and tagging to be recycled for further research. Conclusions Our methods provide a tool that allows to balance the need to translate and the necessary caution about translated plant and mineral names. Our approach is transferable and it can be modified to suit the needs of other primary sources

A systematic methodology to assess the identity of plants in historical texts: A case study. based on the Byzantine pharmacy text John the Physician's Therapeutics

Ethnopharmacological relevance: In recent decades, the study of historical texts has attracted research interest, particularly in ethnopharmacology. All studies of the materia medica cited in ancient and medieval texts share a concern, however, as to the reliability of modern identifications of these substances. Previous studies of European or Mediterranean texts relied mostly on authoritative dictionaries or glossaries providing botanical identities for the historical plant names in question. Several identities they suggest, however, are questionable and real possibility of error exists. Aim of the study: This study aims to develop and document a novel and interdisciplinary methodology providing more objective assessment of the identity of the plants (and minerals) described in these resources. Materials and methods: We developed an iterative experimental approach, using the 13th century Byzantine recipe text John the Physician's Therapeutics in its Commentary version (JC) as a case study. The methodology has six stages and relies on comparative analyses including statistical evaluation of botanical descriptions and information about medicinal uses drawn from both historical and modern sources. Stages 1-4 create the dataset, stage 5 derives the primary outcomes to be reviewed by experts in stage 6. Results: Using Disocorides' De Materia Medica (DMM) (1st century CE) as the culturally related reference text for the botanical descriptions of the plants cited in JC, allowed us to link the 194 plants used medicinally in JC with 252 plants cited in DMM. Our test sample for subsequent analyses consisted of the 50 JC plant names (corresponding to 61 DMM plants) for which DMM holds rich morphological information, and the 130 candidate species which have been suggested in the literature as potential botanical identities of those 50 JC plant names. Statistical evaluation of the comparative analyses revealed that in the majority of the cases, our method detected the candidate species having a higher likelihood of being the correct attribution from among the pool of suggested candidates. Final assessment and revision provided a list of the challenges associated with applying our methodology more widely and recommendations on how to address these issues. Conclusions: We offer this multidisciplinary approach to more evidence-based assessment of the identity of plants in historical texts providing a measure of confidence for each suggested identity. Despite the experimental nature of our methodology and its limitations, its application allowed us to draw conclusions about the validity of suggested candidate plants as well as to distinguish between alternative candidates of the same historical plant name. Fully documenting the methodology facilitates its application to historical texts of any kind of cultural or linguistic background

Pharmaceutical Terminology in Ancient and Medieval Time – "Andrachne", "Chrysocolla" and Others

Ancient and medieval pharmacological and medical texts contain a substantial amount of plant and mineral names. In some cases, the identification is straightforward. But for the majority of the data, we are unable to identify these ingredients with high certainty. In this paper, we discuss a selection of plant and mineral names both from a humanities and sciences point of view. In one case, the scientists were even able to examine a plant in situ. The conclusion of our paper is that a close collaboration between sciences and humanities is essential to avoid mistakes in the identification of materia medica

Chapter Plant Name Resources

Plant names are the key to communicating and managing information about plants. This paper considers how providers of high quality technical plant name information can better meet the requirements non-botanical audiences who also rely on plant names for elements of their work. The International Plant Name Index, World Checklist of Selected Plant Families and The Plant List are used as examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of plant name resources from a non-expert user’s perspective. The above resources can be thought of as botanists pushing data at audiences. Without closer engagement with users, however, there is a limit to their relevance and impact. The need to cover common names is a frequent criticism of existing resources. The Medicinal Plant Names Services (MPNS, www.kew.org/mpns) is an example of how plant name resources can be adapted to better address the needs of a non-botanical audience. Some of the major challenges are outlined and solutions suggested

Towards a New Legume Systematics Portal

The need for scientists to exchange, share, and organise data has resulted in a proliferation of research data portals in the past decades. These cyberinfrastructures have had a major impact on taxonomy and helped to revitalise the discipline, by allowing quick access to bibliographic information, biological and nomenclatural data, and specimen information. In addition, several specialised portals aggregate particular data types for a large number of species and can be queried to extract information for a particular taxonomic group. Because of their ecological and economic importance, several early initiatives to develop and deploy information technologies for capturing, sharing, and disseminating information focused specifically on the plant family Leguminosae (Fabaceae). Initiatives such as ILDIS (International Legume Database and Information Service), which was created in 1985, led the way in developing methods and thinking with regard to taxonomic data management more generally. More recently, the Legume Phylogeny Working Group (LPWG) was founded in 2010 with the objective of facilitating collaboration amongst systematists working on the plant family Leguminosae (Fabaceae). As part of this endeavour, the LPWG has explored whether it would be desirable and pertinent to develop a new portal focused on the legume family. We argue that, despite access to numerous data aggregation portals, a taxon-focussed portal curated by a community of researchers specialised on a particular taxonomic group, such as the LPWG, have the interest, commitment, existing collaborative links, and knowledge necessary to verify data quality, thereby providing a valuable resource and actively contributing to other more general data providers. We consider that a new portal focused on Leguminosae would thus serve a useful function in parallel to and different from large international data-aggregation portals. We explored best practices for developing a legume-focused portal that will enable long-term sustainability, data sharing, a better understanding of what data are available, missing, or erroneous, and ultimately facilitate cross analyses and development of novel research. We surveyed existing data portals to see what features are of interest to our goal and we present a general way forward for developing a legume-focused portal that would respond to the needs of the legume systematics research community as well as to the broader user community. We propose to take full advantage of existing data sources, informatics tools, and protocols to develop an easily manageable, scalable, and interactive portal that will be used, contributed to, and fully endorsed and supported by the legume systematics community

World Checklist of Useful Plant Species

Plants are essential to human wellbeing, supporting important ecosystem services that are critical components of Natural Capital. They supply food, medicine, fibre, fuel and building materials, and provide a broad spectrum of benefits to society, offering vital solutions to some of the world’s major challenges, including bioenergy, human and animal health, nutrition, microbial resistance, industrial biotechnology, and synthetic biology.In 2016, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew published the first State of the World's Plants report, with key statistics on plants. One of its highlights was the compilation of a list of 31,128 plant species with a documented human use from ten datasets (Diazgranados et al. 2018; RBG Kew 2016). Here, we added the datasets from the Medicinal Plant Names Services (MPNS version 8.2), the Plant Resources of South-East Asia (PROSEA) and the Useful Plants of New Guinea, for a total of 13 large datasets.The resulting checklist contains 40,292 species, including nine non-plant taxa retained because they are frequently misidentified as plants (e.g. nostoc, forkweed, brown algae). The checklist is classified into three kingdoms (Plantae with 40,283 species, Chromista with eight species, and Bacteria with one species), six divisions/phyla, 14 classes, 101 orders, 433 families and 6,737 genera. The nomenclature of the species follows the International Plant Names Index (IPNI: 40,239 names with Life Sciences Identifier - LSID), with a few exceptions for taxa not present in it, for which AlgaeBase (30 names) and Tropicos (23 names) were used. The family classification follows the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (v.2.0) and Plants of the World Online (POWO). For higher taxonomy, the taxonomic backbone of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was used. The classification of uses is based on a modified version of the Economic Botany Data Collections Standard with ten Level 1 categories: medicines (26,662 species), materials (13,663), environmental uses (8,983), human food (7,039), gene sources (5,212), animal food (4,433), poisons (3,013) social uses (2,596), fuels (2,529) and invertebrate food (1,041). The five most diverse families are Fabaceae (3,547 species), Asteraceae (2,367), Poaceae (2,024), Rubiaceae (1,352), and Euphorbiaceae (1,120). With at least 328 species with reported uses, Solanum is the richest genus, followed by Ficus (308), Euphorbia (287), Digitaria (246) and Syzygium (193). Ninety-one families and 2,790 genera have only one species reported, and 70 species have use reports in all ten categories. The final checklist includes the following information: kingdoms, divisions/phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species names (with publication authors); LSID numbers; categories of use reported for each species; if considered a crop wild relative; and main sources for the information for most cases. Suggested citation: Diazgranados, M., Allkin, B., Black N., Cámara-Leret, R., Canteiro C., Carretero J., Eastwood R., Hargreaves S., Hudson A., Milliken W., Nesbitt, M., Ondo, I., Patmore, K., Pironon, S., Turner, R., Ulian, T. (2020). World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. Produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity