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World Myrtaceae Checklist and Bibliography

Myrtaceae specialists in the Kew Herbarium to edit the Myrtaceae checklist.  L to R; L. Landrum, M. Sobral, T. Alves, L. Soares Silva, E. Nic Lughadha, F. Mazine, K. Matsumoto, F. Barrie, E. Lucas, P. Wilson, L. Jennings, B. Holst, R. Govaerts.

The World Myrtaceae Checklist & Bibliography is a major contribution to Kew’s commitment to the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, addressing Target 1: A widely accessible working list of known plant species, as a step towards a complete world flora.  The checklist will also be of critical use to the wider Myrtaceae community, providing an invaluable inventory of taxonomically validated seed plant names and associated bibliographic details for 5615 species in c. 140 genera.

The World Myrtaceae Checklist & Bibliography manuscript was compiled by Rafaël Govaerts, based on a Myrtaceae subset from the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), verified and updated according to taxonomic literature and, once compiled, the accuracy of the records required checking.  In a large family such as Myrtaceae with distribution centres in both the old and new worlds, the cooperation of experts from several institutions was required.

In February 2005 a workshop was held at the Kew Herbarium in which a manuscript of the World Myrtaceae Checklist & Bibliography was reviewed by a team of international Myrtaceae researchers with a view to develop and implement a strategy for checking and editing the status of each name.  Nine visiting researchers committed to adopt a taxonomic or geographically defined portion of the list to edit.  This resulted in a total of 652 corrections and updates being made to the manuscript and a product reflecting consensus among Myrtaceae specialists.

The World Myrtaceae Checklist & Bibliography is now online.  The searchable list provides information on accepted scientific names and synonyms of selected plant families, allowing searches of all the scientific names of a particular genus, or the distribution of a taxon by country and TDWG code.  The checklist will continue to be edited and maintained through collaboration with international Myrtaceae researchers and according to the arrangement of the Kew Myrtaceae collection, working towards the point where Myrtaceae taxonomy is sufficiently stable for the checklist to be published in hard copy.

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