Checking and organising your species lists - the easy way

Many of us often need to gather species lists, either from our own field surveys or from bibliographical sources and databases. Many problems may arise during this process. For instance, a species may have been given different names by different authors, and we don’t know which one is currently accepted. Or the species may have recently been placed in a new family or genus after some phylogenetic study, and we are unaware of that. Or more simply, the species name may have been misspelled, and we would like to check our species list before sending our work to publication.

A recently developed online tool, Plantminer, will help to fix all those problems fast and easily - and for free! Just send them a text file with your preliminary species list and they will send back to you a revised list with updated and proper species names, authors, taxonomic classification, etc. Furthermore, you can easily call Plantminer from R by using their API services (a generic R function is provided in their help page).

I think this is a wonderful and really useful resource. Many thanks, Plantminer developers!