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Available in | English |
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Owner | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
URL | Plants of the World Online |
Commercial | No |
Launched | March 2017 |
Plants of the World Online (POWO) is an online database published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
After the Convention on Biological Diversity, Plants of the World Online was launched by the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew in March 2017 to create an exhaustive online database of seed-bearing plants worldwide.[1][2] The initial focus was on tropical African flora, particularly flora Zambesiaca, flora of West and East Tropical Africa.[3]
Since March 2024, the website displays AI-generated predictions of the extinction risk for each plant.[4]
The database uses the same taxonomical source as Kew's World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, which is the International Plant Names Index,[3] and the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP).[5]
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.[6]
As of September 2024[update], POWO contained 1,433,000 global plant names, 531,800 detailed descriptions, and 400,900 images.