Botanical Garden seeks to catalog world's plant species

ST. LOUIS -- Humans have studied and named plants for thousands of years, but now, a team in St. Louis is leading the effort to create a catalog of all the world's plants.

It's a massive undertaking, creating a sort of encyclopedia of every green living thing, from the papyrus that ancient Egyptians made into paper, to the Pacific yew tree that yielded a cancer-fighting drug.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that the Missouri Botanical Garden has begun a $100 million, decade-long effort to build a database that will include every tree, grass, flower, fern and moss known.

Its creators hope that the "World Plant Checklist" will offer scientists and backyard botanists a comprehensive source of information about the name, range and conservation status of every plant species.

The database could be used to determine if a newly discovered plant is really something new, or to predict locations around the globe where endangered plants might be found.

Peter Raven, the garden's director, envisions the database as a tool for documenting and protecting the approximately 400,000 plant species in the world, about a quarter to half of which are considered to be threatened by extinction.

"Environmental destruction is going so rapidly," Raven said. "It's intolerable. We need to act."

The project is just getting under way. The Missouri garden has enlisted the help of Kew Botanic Gardens near London and the New York Botanical Garden. Other gardens around the world will be invited to participate, said Bob Magill, research director at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

"We realized this is too big of a task for us alone," he said.

The gardens are in the process of writing grant applications to help fund the project, Magill said.

The three gardens have expertise in different areas. The Missouri garden specializes in plants of Vietnam, China and the Americas, especially in the tropics. Kew focuses on Old World plants of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York garden has done extensive work in Brazil and the Caribbean, Magill said.

Raven hopes the database will be available in an online, searchable format, with links to photographs, drawings, studies, field notes, herbarium samples and other data. For example, the St. Louis garden has 6 million dried, pressed plant samples in its own herbarium, 1.8 million of which are already online, that could be included.

In its early stage, the database will include only a plant species name, its synonyms, a description of where it can be found, and an explanation of whether it is endangered or not, Magill said.

Just determining what a plant is properly called can be a matter of controversy. Although the number of plant species in the world has been estimated at 310,000 to 422,000, there are more than a million plant names. Sometimes plants are "discovered" more than once, and sometimes botanists disagree as to what genetic family a plant belongs.

The database would have to be continuously updated, because about 2,000 new plant species are discovered every year.

Magill noted that most medicines come from plant extracts that are then manipulated and duplicated in a lab. Other plants contain genes that could help make food crops hardier or more nutritious.

"We're killing right now a lot of plants where we don't know what they might be useful for," he said.