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Storing accepted scientific names alone can lead to misinterpretation of botanical data

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Abstract

Botanists use accepted scientific names from authoritative databases to standardise taxonomic classifications. As taxonomic understanding evolves, these databases are updated, causing accepted names to change over time. A key decision when creating datasets about plants is whether to store the scientific names as originally recorded in a data source or to resolve them to currently accepted names. This decision partly depends on the transitivity of name resolution across taxonomic database versions: if name A resolves to B as the ‘accepted’ name in one version, and B to C in a later version, will A also resolve to C in that later version? Using the World Checklist of Vascular Plants and World Flora Online, we demonstrate that this transitivity fails for approximately 1% and 6% of names, respectively, and that the number of these discrepancies increases as new taxonomy versions are released. We recommend that botanical datasets store verbatim names as found and resolve them to accepted names as close to the point of end-use as possible, using the most recent taxonomic database.

Data availability

All results and generated lists can be found in the Zenodo archive (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18082410) of the GitHub repository (https://github.com/alrichardbollans/SciNameTransitivity). Given two taxonomic database versions, v1 and v2, you can access a table of all names in v1 that resolve to different names in v2 using strategy (1) or (2) under the path [DB]_versions/outputs/v1_v2/all_results.csv, where [DB] is one of WCVP or WFO.

Code availability

All collected data, analyses and results can be found in the Zenodo archive of the GitHub repository30.

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Funding

This project was partly funded by a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Resources Grant (223746/Z/21/Z).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, UK

    Adam Richard-Bollans, Bob Allkin, Francesco Civita, Kristina Patmore & Rafaël Govaerts

Authors

  1. Adam Richard-Bollans
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  2. Bob Allkin
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  3. Francesco Civita
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  4. Kristina Patmore
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  5. Rafaël Govaerts
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Contributions

Conceptualisation: ARB. Methodology: ARB. Software: ARB. Data collection: ARB, RG. Interpretation: ARB, BA, FC, KP, RG. Writing (original draft, review and editing): ARB, BA, FC, KP, RG. All authors approved of the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to
Adam Richard-Bollans.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Richard-Bollans, A., Allkin, B., Civita, F. et al. Storing accepted scientific names alone can lead to misinterpretation of botanical data.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-47142-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-47142-0

Keywords

  • Taxonomic name resolution
  • Taxonomic databases
  • Taxonomy
  • World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP)
  • World Flora Online (WFO)

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