About the World Flora Online project

WFO’s June 2025 release

The June 2025 edition of the WFO Plant List and data release are now available, with improvements to nomenclatural data and updates to the classification from the global taxonomic community. Since the December 2024 edition, the WFO Plant List now includes:

• 9,439 additional names provided by IPNI, our Taxonomic Expert Networks (TENs), WFO Content providers, and WCVP;
• 216,491 name records which have had classification or nomenclatural updates;

This data release has been co-authored by 238 scientists who have contributed to the WFO’s consensus classification. Including 34 active editors in the WFO’s Rhakhis curation tool.

Updates to family classifications have been provided by:

• The Acanthaceae TEN have begun curation in Rhakhis.
• The Annonaceae has continued active curation in Rhakhis. The TEN also produced a WFO linked updated checklist of Annonaceae species of the western Indian Ocean published in Candollelea.
• The Apocynaceae provided and supergeneric classification and continues to actively curate the species classification in Rhakhis.
• The Asteraceae TEN (The International Compositae Alliance) provided some updates to that family, via www​.com​posi​tae​.org hosted by hosted by VLIZ.
• We modified the family structure of Boraginales to reflect the community based classification recognising 11 families in the order, rather than the single family Boraginaceae in the APG. 
• The Caryophyllales Network has updated classification in Rhakhis for Cactaceae, Caryophyllaceae and Polgonaceae.
• The Combretaceae provided a supra-generic classification and have begun species level curation.
• The Commelinales have curated parts of Commelinaceae, Haemodoraceae, Philydraceae and Pontederiaceae.
• The Convolvulaceae begun curation in Rhakhis and have focused on reducing the number of unplaced names, shrinking this by about 60%.
• Tribe Cichoriae (Asteraceae) provided updated classification for this tribe of Asteraceae via their EDIT platform database. This round of improvements has placed an additional 1300 names in synonymy.
• The Cyperaceae TEN provided a full classification for the family from The Global Cyperaceae Database (GCypD) hosted by VLIZ. Our classification data is now linked through to Cyper​aceae​.org.
• Fabaceae was updated to v.6 (2025) of the Legume Checklist, provided by the Legume Taxonomy Working Group.
• The Meliaceae TEN has provided another round of classification updates.
• The Myrtaceae provided a suprageneric classification and have been curating species level classification in Rhakhis.
• Arecaceae, Sapotaceae, Urticaceae TENs primarily curate their classification in WCVP. These were updated by an advanced copy of WCVP v.13, provided by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
• There have also been updates and improvements to: Asphodelaceae (tribe Aloeae), Begoniaceae, Dioscoraceae, Ebenaceae, Ericaceae, Gesneriaceae, Solanaceae and Zingiberaceae, provided by the TENs responsible for these families.

55% of accepted species in the WFO Plant List are covered by a Taxonomic Expert Network.

Updates to the default classification used for the 303 non-TEN families are provided by RBG Kew’s WCVP. Since the December 2024 release the following 17 non-TEN families have been updated to follow WCVP version 12 (May 2024): Alseuosmiaceae, Anacardiaceae, Argophyllaceae, Burseraceae, Crypteroniaceae, Goodeniaceae, Lythraceae, Menyanthaceae, Passifloraceae, Penaeaceae, Phellinaceae, Rutaceae, Simaroubaceae, Stylidiaceae, Vochysiaceae.

Data cleaning and improvements to the data, were facilitated Rhakhis integrity reports and Catalogue of Life ChecklistBank’s validation checks. We continue to deduplicate as part of general curation and have deduplicated a modest 100 name pairs since the December release, although the number of isonyms and homonyms continues to increase.

The WFO Plant List data are available in four places:

• The WFO Plant List section of the WFO website, https://​wfo​plantlist​.org, is the main place to browse the data.
• The WFO Plant List API, https://​list​.world​flo​raon​line​.org, provides a machine readable version of the data and powers the version on the WFO website.
• The Zenodo repository is under DOI https://​doi​.org/​​1​0​.​5​2​8​1​/​z​e​n​o​d​o​.​7​4​60141. This DOI should be used when citing the WFO Plant List data in general as it will always resolve to the latest version of the data. Each edition of the WFO Plant List also has its own DOI should it be necessary to cite a particular version. The June 2025 version​​’s DOI is https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​5​2​8​1​/​z​e​n​o​d​o​.​1​5​7​04590.
• ChecklistBank (Catalogue of Life/​GBIF) https://​www​.check​list​bank​.org/​​d​a​t​a​s​e​t​/​2​0​0​4​/​about . The WFO Plant List can be browsed and downloaded from there.

Since the December 2024 data release the WFO have welcomed seven new TENs and the expansion of an existing TEN:

• Asparagaceae subfam. Scilloideae
• Boraginales
• Clusiaceae
• Combretaceae
• Convolvulaceae
• Loasaceae
• Podostemaceae

The Salicaceae TEN also now curates Lacistemataceae.

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Published 21 June 2025.