| Plants of the World Online | |
| Url: | Plants of the World Online |
| Commercial: | No |
| Language: | English |
| Content Licence: | --> |
| Owner: | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
| Editors: | --> |
Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an online database published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. It was launched in March 2017 with the ultimate aim being "to enable users to access information on all the world's known seed-bearing plants by 2020".[1] This was Kew's answer to the "2020 target 1" of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD): "an online flora for all known plants."[2]
The initial focus was on tropical African Floras, particularly Flora Zambesiaca, Flora of West Tropical Africa and Flora of Tropical East Africa.
The database uses the same taxonomical source as Kew's World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, which is the International Plant Names Index, and the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP).[3]
The database contains information of the world's flora that was gathered in the past 250 years of botanical research. It aims to make data available from projects that no longer have an online presence or were never externally available. POWO has information on taxonomy, identification, distribution, traits, threat status and use of plants worldwide. It also contains many images.[4]
, POWO contained 1,433,000 global plant names, 531,800 detailed descriptions, and 400,900 images.[5]