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More than half of all flowering plant names to be scrapped

608px-Solanum_lycopersicum_-_Tomato_flower_(aka).jpgBotanists had long believed the accepted number of flowering plant species to be an overestimate, but few are likely to have guessed the scale of the miscalculation. New research suggests that at least 600,000 flowering plant names – more than half – are synonyms, or duplicate names.

Many plant species end up with more than one name, a particularly extreme example being the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), which has about 800 aliases. Alan Paton of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London, part of the team working to tackle synonymy, says the problem occurs across the plant kingdom. “There are generally about two and a half synonymous names for every accepted name,” he says, adding that widespread and economically important species, such as the tomato, “tend to have more synonyms”.

Historically, the obscure nature of botanical literature has made it difficult for researchers to access all the existing accounts of the groups they are studying, where they might have discovered that the ‘new’ species they had stumbled on, named and described was actually old hat.

Even in more recent times, information about plant names is spread around several databases in different parts of the world, and the data have never been gathered in one place before.

Now, after nearly three years of working to weed out synonymy in some of the largest and most comprehensive of these databases, researchers at Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis and Kew have produced ‘The Plant List’, a definitive working list of all plant species.


A survey of plant names on this scale has never been undertaken before because of the huge amount of data involved, but now the use of an automated, rule-based system has provided a breakthrough.

“We’ve been merging these databases, but there are conflicts,” says Paton. “You have to decide which source you prefer. We take global sources in preference to regional ones, and later sources over earlier ones.”

The researchers have downgraded the likely number of flowering plant species from previous estimates of around one million to about 400,000, suggesting that at least 600,000 accepted species names are invalid.

The list is currently a first-draft, and work remains to be done before it is truly definitive. “There are other datasets out there that we’d like to get hold of and add to this global dataset,” says Paton.

The team hopes their final list will be published and made widely available to researchers by the end of 2010. “We want to provide something useful quickly because at the moment there is nothing which is globally comprehensive and provides synonyms,” says Paton. “It won’t be perfect, but it will be the best thing there is in one place.”

The creation of such a list was the primary target of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, first proposed in 1999 and adopted by 139 nations as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2002.

The current draft of ‘The Plant List’ has already been used to help choose which plant species will be included in the Red List Index for Plants – a global analysis of extinction risk.

Image: Solanum lycopersicum flower. Photo by André Karwath via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons

Comments

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    SKT Nasar said:

    Researching synonymy is a timely venture. In the olden days synonyms appeared mainly because information sharing was time taking and costly additionally barriered by different languages and dialects.

    These problems are much easier to tackle in the 21st century.

    However, the problem of defining species boundaries continues to remain knotty. At what level of organisation – sub-molecular to organismal – should we categorise species?

    Despite the points of debates as noted above, the present effort is commendable.

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    Bill said:

    I agree that there are way too many different names in the Plant Kingdom. It has almost gotten so confusing that people can hardly tell the difference between a tulip and a sunflower anymore. People have been going around and when they think they see a new type of plant species they will give it a new name. However, these “new” plant species will have already been discovered but given a different name. These synonyms have been accumulating and have caused great confusion around the world. The best solution is to do what these botanists are doing and consolidate the plant data by taking away all of the synonyms. The problem arises as to how the consolidation should take place? Should a computer program be in charge of telling us what plants are called what? I have a problem with letting a mass computer program sort through the different names because in the end, it has the ability to throw out a plant’s name, which may not be a duplicate of another. In that case we may lose the plants name forever. I say we do it the long but sure way and set a definite measurement of what determines the difference between all of the plants, be it sub molecular or molecular level, so that we do not lose any. How would you feel if you were in a class and everyone’s name was on that list except yours?

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    Don said:

    Thanks for the nice article. It would be interesting to know how much of the names and placements have been checked with DNA sequences.

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