Center for Plant Conservation

The Center for Plant Conservation will develop a national framework for reconciling plant taxonomy. Although plant names are foundational to research, conservation, collections management, land stewardship, regulation, and public communication, the United States currently lacks a single, broadly accepted checklist that integrates differing taxonomic opinions in a consistent and publicly accessible way. The Center for Plant Conservation will partner with botanical and biodiversity data organizations to establish and test a replicable process for building consensus taxonomy. The project will produce annual checklist releases for the vascular plants of the United States, create a permanent public archive of proposals, discussions, voting outcomes, and decision rationales, and generate a methodological model for how biodiversity communities can govern contested scientific information in an open, durable, and scalable way. As a result, federal and state agencies, herbaria, botanic gardens, conservation organizations, researchers, and educators will have access to reliable and consistent scientific resources that inform plant conservation.