How does World Flora Online compare to Plants of the World?

Hi

Has anyone here used World Flora Online? Do you feel it is a good resource?
How does it compare to POWO?

I’ve done a few random searches of species POWO couldn’t help me with and I found them in World Flora Online. This could of course be plain luck, but my overall impression is that it is more complete.

I also feel WFO is a bit more user friendly and practical.

1 Like

Very poor. I am having trouble with poor internet and rolling blackout since last week. I look at one genus and one species. The information here is incompletely pulled from the Kew Plantlist 1.1 therefore the data is about current as from before 2013. The date and volume number as well as page numbers are missing. Therefore not very practical. This is an initiative between numerous herbaria and institute to provide a World Flora. Therefore i do not think the checklist can be a priority. Although I looked up one genus data of species of other genera (species name same as genus names) are also included here. Thus the data is not hierarchical as in POWO.

Please note the Plantlist was a short collaboration between Kew and Missouri and contain the basis of the information on POWO.

I concur with Robert. Although I have very limited experience with World Flora Online, those limited experiences suggest that WFO is only complete for some regions/nations and is not as complete globally as PoWO. Just my experience, others will have different takes on this!

1 Like

I would be cautious about assuming because you find a particular species in one source but not another that the first is superior.

While it can mean it is more complete or updated, it can equally reflect that it is adding things that do not have broad scientific support or not doing as good a job keeping up with taxonomy updates.I

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Although this topic was closed, I remain interested in whether this situation has changed as World Flora Online now claims to index more names than Plant of the World and for ferns says it is following PPG which is presently the practice in iNaturalist - a variance from PoWO. Just wondering as WFO also lists Kew as a contributor. The topic is closed, but this comment belongs at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-does-world-flora-online-compare-to-plants-of-the-world/8533.