Sourcesbotanical

Sourcesbotanical is a community-driven, open-source repository that aggregates and standardizes bibliographic and data sources used in plant science. It catalogs primary literature, herbarium records, taxonomic treatments, genome data, and ethnobotanical sources, linking each item to plant taxa and occurrences.

The project aims to improve reproducibility and data integration by providing provenance for plant information. Each entry includes persistent identifiers, author details, publication year, licensing, and cross-links to related datasets, enhancing traceability across studies and databases.

Data model and interoperability are central to sourcesbotanical. Core entities include Source, Taxon, Specimen, and Reference, with sources carrying DOIs or accession numbers. The platform supports standard vocabularies and taxon concepts, and is designed to interoperate with external databases such as Tropicos, IPNI, and GBIF via APIs and export formats.

History and governance: sourcesbotanical was initiated by a coalition of botanical libraries, universities, and research institutes in the late 2010s. Development is community-led, featuring open governance, version control, and regular releases to incorporate new sources and corrections.

Access and licensing: the project is hosted under open-source licenses, with data potentially released under CC0 or CC-BY. Programmatic access is provided through a RESTful API, and downloadable data dumps are available for research and educational use.

Impact and use: sourcesbotanical supports taxonomic revisions, cross-study data integration, and botanical education. It enables researchers to verify source provenance, track original descriptions, and compare synonymy across multiple authoritative references.