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

Abstract

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.