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Kew scans the world of plants into a book of life

Posted on: Monday, 19 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

Kew scientists are compiling the first volumes of the cyber book of life. In the next few years - in some cases already - researchers and growers anywhere in the world will be able to see via the internet a high-resolution image of a rare plant preserved in the herbarium of London's Royal Botanic Gardens for more than 200 years.

They will also be able to study plants in its living collection, examine the field notebooks of Victorian botanists, sift a collection of plants adapted to survive in arid lands, comb through the flora of the Zambesi Valley, sample the economic uses of flax, cannabis or willow, or compare the DNA of orchids.

"What we want to do is make all of the information that we have - an enormously wide and varied amount of information about different types of things to do with plant science - available," says Mark Jackson, the architect of e-PIC, Kew's electronic plant information centre.

"Once you start totting it all up you do get into some pretty big figures. Someone coming to the site may only have a plant name, and that may be all they have. They may wish to know what it was used for; they may want to know if we have any specimens of it."

The acronym is e-PIC but the scale is truly epic. Plants are at the base of life's pyramid: humans ultimately depend on them for food, drink, clothing, shelter, tools, medicines, and at one time for ink and paper.

Kew is one of the older scientific bodies and its collection extends back to herbals illuminated by medieval monks, the observations of explorers such as David Livingstone, the first samples brought back from Botany Bay by Sir Joseph Banks, and a collection of 7m pressed examples of leaf, stem, flower and berry.

Many of these are "type" specimens: used to give the plant a scientific identity as a species within a genus and a family.

For the first time taxonomists or botanists or growers in the developing world will be able to examine now rare or even extinct species once collected in their own countries, without the expense of visiting Kew.

This is vital: 80% of life's teeming variety is in the forests, savannahs and swamps of the developing world. But probably 90% of the world's knowledge of life is stored in the libraries, museums and greenhouses of a handful of the world's most expensive cities.

And Kew's slowly growing digital encyclopaedia of plant life could become more than a fingertip reference guide for researchers anywhere in the world. It could turn, ultimately, into the basis of the first authoritative inventory of life on the planet.

This is because, in spite of three centuries of systematic plant science, botanists still live in a confusing world.

IPNI, the international plant names index, once known as Index Kewensis, contains the names of more than a million species of plants.

Nobody has the foggiest idea how many species there may be - new species of flowering plants are still being described at the rate of 2,000 a year - but educated guesses range from 200,000 to 422,000, according to Eimear Nic Lughadha, Kew's science coordinator. So the index contains a lot of what researchers politely call synonymy.

"Plants cross political boundaries but flora writers often don't," she says.

"Typically a lot of synonymy is about one person in one country calling it this and another person describing it as a new species or calling it something different.

"So we need to take a whole group, right across wherever it occurs, and look at the names, to cut down on that synonymy."

Up to one third of all plant species may be in danger of extinction: conservationists need to know where to start, and correct identification is the cornerstone of conservation.

But researchers need more than just a name and a specimen. They need to know as much as possible about the plant: its range, its varieties, its economic uses, its ecological role.

So the challenge is to link the images of precious type specimens to the huge body of information about them in museums, libraries and botanic gardens around the world.

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