Grassed up

sedges. The largest family in this group is the orchid, of which there are about 20,000 species each with unique complex and striking flowers adapted for highly specific insect pollination. The checklist aims to provide a major resource for a range of users, such as plant scientists, horticulturalists, ecologists, conservationists, medical practitioners and lawyers, as well as the wider public who wish to learn more about plants and who previously obtained such information by trawling through specialist literature, much of which was inaccessible to those living away from a major botanical library. The checklist also has extra features to help users. The Checklist Builder allows users to compile lists of monocotyledon species occurring within any continent, region or country, and also it is possible to find out what a plant looks like by a direct link from the accepted name to Google Images. The Checklist aims to be a significant contribution towards meeting international targets, most notably, the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation's target of a global checklist for the entire plant kingdom by 2010. A quarter of this global checklist is now complete, researchers say. The project has taken five years and has been coordinated from the Herbarium at Kew. But it has also depended on the collaboration of many botanists throughout the world, especially in tropical countries, to check and comment on the data. the two databases will shortly be integrated into a single resource. Researchers battling over the provenance of their rice, onions or any other monocotyledon plant get a big help this month. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has just published the world's most definitive checklist of this key group of plants. The World Checklist of Monocotyledons consolidates the accepted names of all 75,000 species, along with their associated synonyms (a total of 200,000 names), into a searchable electronic database for the first time. The monocotyledons are an immensely diverse and economically important group, comprising some 75,000 species in 97 families — over a quarter of all flowering plants. They include the staple grass food crops, such as wheat, barley, rice and maize, and other important food plants such as onions, palms, yams, bananas, pineapples and gingers. Many other species are Rice in there: A new database checklist of the world's monocotyledon plants, which includes some of our most important economic species such as rice, has been published by Kew Gardens in London.