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Botany Reference Resources

Literature Guides Dictionaries & Encyclopedias Directories Bibliographies Taxonomy Nomenclature Literature Floras Databases Geospatial Resources: Atlases, Maps, GIS, Imagery Images Internet Subject Directories/ Gateways/Portals California Resources

Literature Guides

• Guide to Information Sources in the Botanical Sciences (Davis and Schmidt) 1966 (ref QK 45.2 D38 1996)

Dictionaries & Encyclopedias

• Botanical Glossary Online (eFloras.org)
• Bryological Glossary (Missouri Botanical Garden) 1990. Orginally published as GLOSSARIUM POLYGLOTTUM BRYOLOGIAE: A multilingual glossary for bryology in Monographs in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden Vol. 33. Containsthe 1,181 English terms and their definitions along with Latin entries, as well as French, German, and Spanish translations.
  
• Cambridge Illustrated Dictionary of Botanical Terms (Hickey and King) 2000 (ref QK 10 H53 2000
• Collegiate Dictionary of Botany (Swartz) 1971 (ref QK 9 S88 971)
• Concise Oxford Dictionary of Botany (Allaby) 1992 (ref QK 9 C67 1992)
• Dictionary of Botany (Usher) 1966 (ref QK 9 U8 1966)
• Dictionary of Botany (Little & Jones) 1980 (ref QK 9 L735)
• Facts on File Dictionary of Botany (Blackmore & Tootill) 1984 (ref QK 9 F33 1984)
• Longman Illustrated Dictionary of Botany (Sugden) 1984 (ref QK 9 S84 1984)
• Penguin Dictionary of Plant Sciences (Bailey) 1999 (ref QK 9 P465 1999)
• Plant Sciences (Robinson) 2001 (4 volumes) (HSU users only) Contains 280 encyclopedic articles covering all aspects of plant science.

Directories

• Index Herbariorum: A Global Directory of Public Herbaria and Associated Staff (International Association for Plant Taxonomy and the New York Botanical Society) Detailed directory to over 3200 public herbaria of the world and to the staff members associated with them. Search by institution, city, state, acronym, staff member, correspondent, and research specialty.
• International Directory of Botanical Gardens (Heywood) 1990 (ref QK 71 I57 1990)
• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (World Conservation Union) Provides taxonomic, conservation status and distribution information on taxa that are facing a high risk of global extinction.

Bibliographies

• Economic Botany Bibliographic Database (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) Contains 33,000 references to publications on the human uses of flowering plants, gymnosperms and ferns. Entries date from the late nineteenth century to 2003, when data entry stopped. Subjects covered include the ethnobotany of plant use in traditional societies, medical and industrial uses of plants, and their domestication and history. Coverage focuses on wild plants and minor crop plants. Part of the Key Bibliographic Databases database.
• FDA Poisonous Plants Database (US Food and Drug Administration) Index to approximately 100,000 scientific literature references on the toxic properties and effects of plants and plant parts. Search by common name, family and scientific name.
• Index to American Botanical Literature (New York Botanical Garden) (Online--1996 to the present; print copy available in abstract QK 1 T6 in two cumulations 1886-1966 and 1967-1976) Indexes literature on various aspects of extant and living North American, South American and Antarctica vascular and non-vascular plants. Topics covered include systematics and floristics, morphology, ecology, economic botany and general botany. Physiology, genetics and cellular biology are excluded. The online index includes multiple search capabilities. The print volumes are arranged alphabetically by author. Until 1999 the index appearing annually in either the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club or Brittonia.

Taxonomy

• Nomenclature
  • CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names: Common Names, Scientific Names, Eponyms, Synomyms, and Etymology (Quattrocchi) 2000 (red QK13 Q38 2000) (4 volumes) Includes annotations for more than 22,500 genera and 200,000 species of plants.
  • Dictionary of Common Names (Plant Press) Contains 30,000 entries that translate in both directions between common name and scientific name.
  • Dictionary of Plant Names (Coombes) 1985 (ref QK 0 C66 1985) Includes pronunciation, derivation and meaning of botanical names and common name equivalents
  • Geography through Botany: a Dictionary of Plant Names with Geographical Meaning (Kunkel) 1990 (ref QK 96 K85 1990)
  • Glossary of Roots of Botanical Names (Fletcher)
  • Gardener's Dictionary & Plant Name Finder (National Gardening Association) Search by scientific name or common name for over 15,000 plants.
  • Index of Botanists (Harvard University Herbaria) Catalog of plant name authors, collectors, and publication authors. Entries include full name, variant names, B & P abbreviation and major publications of the author. Sources for compiling the catalog include Botanico Periodicum Huntianum, Taxonomic Literature and Brummitt & Powell's Authors of Plant Names.
  • Index Nominum Genericorum (Plantarum) (International Association for Plant Taxonomy and Smithsonian Institution) (print copy available in ref QK 11 I427) Compilation of generic names published for all organisms covered by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. One of the purposes of the database is to bring together all generic names of plants to reveal homonymy between groups. Each entry includes bibliographic citations and information about the typification and nomenclatural status of the generic name.
  • International Plant Names Index (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; and Australian National Herbarium) The most comprehensive database of scientific names used in the scholarly literature for seed plants, along with the associated bibliographic information. Includes 1.5 million entries compiled from Index Kewensis (QK 11 I4), Gray Index and the Australian Plant Names Index. Search by scientific plant name down to infraspecific epithet, by author or by publication. The author search incorporates names from Brummitt & Powell's Authors of Plant Names and can be searched by fullname or author abbreviation. The publication search utilizes information from Botanico Periodicum Huntianum and Taxonomic Literature and can be searched by fullname or publication abbreviation
  • Scientific and Common Names of 7,000 Vascular Plants in the United States (Brako, Rossman and Farr) 1995 (ref QK 96 B68 1995) In four sections--list of scientific names in alphabetical order with associated species and common names; list of common names followed by scientific name; list of important synomyns of scientific names; and list of genera of included plants arranged by plant family.
  • Taxonomic Terminology of the Higher Plants (Featherly) 1973 (ref QK 9 F4 1973)
  • Vascular Plant Families and Genera (Brummitt) The database of 14,000 generic names is derived from Vascular Plant Families and Genera compiled by R. K. Brummitt and published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1992. Search by genera or list genera by family
    
• Literature
  • B-P-H: Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum (Lawrence) 1968 (ref QK 45 H85) Comprehensive compilation of botanical periodical and serial titles, including standard abbreviation and other bibliographic information.
  • Index of Botanical Publications (Harvard University Herbaria) Catalog of books, periodical titles and serial titles that have appeared in the taxonomic literature. Search by title or abbreviation. Each entry includes full title, standard abbreviation, dates of publication, and reference to the entry in Taxonomic Literature or B-P-H.
  • Taxonomic Literature: a Selective Guide to Botanical Publications and Collections with Dates, Commentaries and Types (Stafleu and Cowan) 1976-1988 (ref QK 97 S72 1976) (7 volumes) Major guide to taxonomic literature. Arranged alphabetically by author, with name and title indexes. Each entry includes brief biographical information, herbaria where collections are held, bibliography of works about the author, and an annotated list of the author's important contributions in plant taxonomy.
  • Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) Indexes over 200,000 publications from 1971 to the present on the taxonomy of flowering plants, gymnosperms, and ferns. It also includes references on phytogeography, nomenclature, chromosome surveys, floras and botanical institutionst. Part of the Key Bibliographic Databases database.
  • Index to American Botanical Literature (New York Botanical Garden) (Online--1996 to the present; print copy available in abstract QK 1 T6 in two cumulations 1886-1966 and 1967-1976) Indexes literature on various aspects of extant and living North American, South American and Antarctica vascular and non-vascular plants. Topics covered include systematics and floristics, morphology, ecology, economic botany and general botany. Physiology, genetics and cellular biology are excluded. The online index includes multiple search capabilities. The print volumes are arranged alphabetically by author. Until 1999 the index appearing annually in either the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club or Brittonia.
• Floras
  • Guide to the Standard Floras of the World (Frodin) 2001 (ref QK 45.2 F76 2001) Selective annotated bibliography of the principal floras and related works of inventory of vascular plants.
  • eFloras (eFloras.org) Includes partial online floras for North America, Chile, China and Pakistan.
  • Floras of North America (Smith) (ref QK 110 S67 2003; also available online as a MS Word document) (HSU Herbarium Miscellaneous publication # 5) Bibliography of floras, manuals, checklists, atlases and photographic guides whose primary focus is to assist in the identification North American vascular plants. Arranged in two sections: 1) floras by geographic unit--country, region and province or state; and 2) entries by plant group or use..
• Databases
  • Plants Database (U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service) Provides standardized information about plants with a focus on vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. Includes names, checklists, images, identification information, species abstracts, distributional data, crop information, plant symbols, plant growth data, legal status (threatened and endangered, noxious, wetland indicator status) and literature references.

Geospatial Resources: Atlases, Maps, GIS, Imagery

• See Maps and Atlases: Vegetation Maps (HSU Library)

Images

• Botanical Image Database (University of Basil)

Internet Subject Directories/Gateways/Portals

• AgNIC: Plant Science and Plant Products
• Botany (National Biological Information Infrastructure)
• Internet Directory for Botany (Brach)
• Plant Conservation Resources on the Internet (Carlock)
• Plants Links (U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service)
• WWW Virtual Library: Mycology (Hodge)

Send comments and suggestions about this page to: Robert Sathrum
Lastest Entry: March 16, 2007
Links Last Checked: June 9, 2005