WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data.

Roeland Kindt

doi:10.1002/aps3.11388

Abstract

PremiseThe standardization of plant names is a critical step in various fields of biology, including biodiversity, biogeography, and vegetation research. The WorldFlora package is introduced here to help achieve this goal by matching lists of plant names with a static copy from World Flora Online (WFO), an ongoing global effort to complete an online flora of all known vascular plants and bryophytes by 2020.Methods and ResultsBased on direct and fuzzy matching, WorldFlora inserts matching cases from the WFO to a submitted data set containing taxonomic names. The results and success rates for selecting the expected best single matches are presented for four data sets, including two data sets used in recent comparisons of software tools for correcting taxon names.ConclusionsWorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi‐automatic plant name checking. For the four data sets, the success rate of credible matches ranged from 94.7% to 99.9%.

Highlights

Scientific names of organisms and the higher groups in which they are classified are key identifiers of the world’s biodiversity (Rees, 2014)
WorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi-automatic plant name checking
Analysis of the four data sets showed that the new package WorldFlora matched plants names correctly for the majority of submitted names, with success rates comparable to and sometimes better than alternative software packages such as the Taxonomic Name Resolution Service or Solr

Summary

Introduction

Scientific names of organisms and the higher groups in which they are classified are key identifiers of the world’s biodiversity (Rees, 2014). Assigning a species identify to an organism is essential in a wide array of disciplines including ecology, conservation and forestry (Tyrell, 2019). Removing synonyms from plant species lists is needed to predict the total number of vascular, seed and flowering plant species (Lughadha et al, 2016). Taxonomic uncertainty is one of the major gaps in plant occurrence data needed in global plant ecological, biogeographical and conservation applications (Meyer et al, 2016). Misspellings can lead to failures to retrieve data from global databases that encompass millions of species (Boyle et al, 2013).

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