Martin Freiberg, Curator of the Botanical Garden of the University of Leipzig (Germany) - Wolfgang TeschnerWhen their knowledge reaches heights unattainable by memory, people create lists. From those that name all the living beings on Earth to those of the purchase, they are basic tools, so useful that they are everywhere. It is more or less easy to make an inventory of objects that fit in a shoe box. But who dares to gather the names of all the plant species in the world? A German biologist has just completed this daunting task, compiling the most complete, up-to-date and detailed record to date, with more than a million plant nomeclatures. Its result has just been published in the journal « Scientific data ».
Specifically, the new Leipzig Catalog of Vascular Plants (LCVP) includes 1,315,562 scientific names , the total of those known to man to date. It includes 351,180 species of vascular plants - ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms, most of the terrestrial plants that have true roots, stems and leaves - and 6,160 natural hybrids of 13,460 genera, 564 families and 84 orders . It also lists all the different names each plant is known by and provides far more taxonomic details than the current checklist, The Plant List , compiled by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (London), which has not been updated since 2013.
Twelve years cataloging plants
"I started in 2008, but I have worked more intensively during the last 10 years, dedicating about 2 days a week to it," Martin Freiberg , curator of the Botanical Garden of the University of Leipzig (Germany) and main creator of the list , tells ABC . At first, he intended to develop a catalog for internal use at his center. "But then many colleagues from other botanical gardens in Germany urged me to make the work available to everyone." This is where his colleagues from the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) entered , who have helped in the gigantic Freiberg company, which from now on is accessible to anyone through this website .
The biologist realized that many times the names of the species were not clear, and that there were " gaps " that could interfere with the work of scientific research, even limiting the reliability of some studies . "I wanted to remove this obstacle as well as possible," he says. That is why it compiled information from the main databases, harmonized them and standardized the names. He also reviewed about 4,500 studies to investigate more discrepancies, such as different spellings or nomeclatures. In addition, it added thousands of new species, identified mainly thanks to advances in molecular genetic analysis techniques.
“For example, I found old names that have not been used for a long time, but are there, on herbarium labels that may be 200 years old . It is difficult to find information about whether these names are still valid or not, ”he explains. Other big problems he encountered were separating the names of garden hybrids and natural hybrids, or efficiently cataloging the most numerous genus of all, Hieracium , which comprises 12,614 described species of which only 1,411 have been accepted so far. "As the head of the Leipzig Botanical Garden, I am conservative about this, and I wait until the evidence is robust enough to change any name.
Any scientist anywhere in the world
The importance of this work, therefore, lies not only in having all the plants in the world "ordered", but in establishing a new standardized, updated and common base, which can be consulted by any scientist anywhere on the planet. "Almost all fields in plant research depend on naming species in the right way," adds Marten Winter of iDiv and another of the study authors. 'Modern science often means combining data sets from different sources . We need to know exactly which species scientists are referring to, so that we don't compare apples and oranges or wrongly group different species. '
The next project Frieberg has in mind is even more ambitious: cataloging all the non-vascular plants (those that lack stem and flower, such as mosses) in the world. "But that takes a little more time ...".