International Plant Names Index

Infobox Website
name = International Plant Names Index

url = http://www.ipni.org
commercial = No
type = Database
registration = Not required
owner = Plant Names Project
author = The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Harvard University Herbarium, and the Australian National Herbarium
launch date = 1999
current status =

The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database of botanical names. It indexes names of seed plants, ferns and "fern allies". Coverage is best at the rank of species and genus (see e.g. [http://www.ipni.org/ik_blurb.html "IK"] ). It includes basic bibliographical details, associated with the names, and its goals include eliminating the need for repeated reference to primary sources for basic bibliographic information about plant names.

IPNI is the product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Index Kewensis), The Harvard University Herbaria (Gray Herbarium Index), and the Australian National Herbarium (APNI). The IPNI database is a collection of the names registered by the three cooperating institutions and they work towards standardizing the information. The standard of author abbreviations recommended by the " International Code of Botanical Nomenclature" is Brummitt and Powell’s "Authors of Plant Names", a digital (and updated) version of which can be consulted online at IPNI.

IPNI is available at [http://www.ipni.org ipni.org] , free of charge, with two mirror sites. The IPNI provides names that have appeared in scholarly publications, with the objective of providing an index of published names rather than prescribing the accepted botanical nomenclature.cite journal |last= Lughadha |first=Eimear Nic |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=2004 |month=April 29 |title=Towards a working list of all known plant species |journal=Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. |volume=359 |issue=1444 |pages=681–687 | pmid = 1693359 |url=http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1693359&blobtype=pdf |accessdate=2008-03-18 |quote= |doi=10.1098/rstb.2003.1446 ]

A similar project, which lists names of fungi, is the Index Fungorum.

References