The first community endorsed, consensus legume checklist was published in June 2021 and is now available on the Catalogue of Life’s (CoL) ChecklistBank.
The Legume Phylogeny Working Group (LPWG) tasked its Taxonomy Working Group (TWG) with creating an up-to-date legume checklist to support legume-related research on traits, occurrences and phylogenomics but also more broadly to provide a species list that can be used by online portals to easy the flow of data from one to the other, e.g. Catalogue of Life, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Plants of the World Online, World Flora Online. The TWG joined forces with the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) team based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and collaborated closely with Rafaël Govaerts, the editor. Over the past year, 80 taxon experts helped to check and verify names representing 43% of all legume genera. The published list is available from the CoL ChecklistBank but is also accessible on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s (GBIF) Legume Data Portal, GBIF, the WCVP website and Plants of the World Online Portal.
Curating and maintaining the legume checklist will be an ongoing process and we invite legume taxon experts to volunteer their help in this ambitious task.
The TWG is now also the official legume Taxon Expert Network for the World Flora Online (WFO) and our checklist will serve as the legume component of the WFO taxonomic backbone in future.
For more information or to become involved, please contact Marianne le Roux or Anne Bruneau