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Den
Virtuella Floran
2040 vascular plants, searchable and systematically organized.
Very useful texts, moderatly useful in situ photos. Swedish-only.
One of my main resources for identification early on, and I still
use it quite often - particularly for English common names.
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BSBI
plant names
Recently (October 2004) I found this list of plantnames in English,
for wild plants occurring in GB, with scientific names at the
Botanical Society
of the British Isles. Apart from that it's amazing how little
my list of botanical favourites has changed in three years.
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Malcolm Storey's Bioimages
Huge collection of great images: photos in situ and closeup, scans
and microscope photos of several parts and stages of plants. Just
the kind you need when you're checking your shaky identifications.
My link goes to the vascular plants section, because that's where
I usually go, but the collection covers more of the Kingdoms of
Life.
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Google is of course not a specifically botanical site - but searches on scientific names of plants are usually very rewarding. And don't forget the image search. The general WWW bias towards in situ shots of flowering specimens and the corresponding scarcity of good pictures of important stuff like basal leaves is not the fault of the search engine.
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The Missouri
flora web page was useful to me when I had the Coreopsis
- there's a site with pictures of leaves, kept by somebody with
an interest in helping people to learn identifications. I appreciate
that.
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The
Plants database of the United States Department of Agriculture
is one of my frequently visited bookmarks - Swedish weed flora
has a lot of commonality with the US. I'm not sure how well updated
they keep their classifications, though, and the pictures in the
gallery
are very moderately useful.
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Searching for scientific names I often end up in Finland
at the life
forms database kept by Markku Savela, who started from
an interest in Lepidoptera, but has ended up keeping a database
which illustrates the whole taxonomic tree of Life in nicely accessible
ways. For plants there is usually also interesting info about
who feeds from them. And there's a picture
database as well. (The link goes to vasculalr plants).
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The Multilingual Multiscript Plant Name Database
is where you should look if it's names of edible plants or weeds
in Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other Asian languages you're after.
I found them when looking for Echinochloa
- and I've been there checking out cabbages. There's a small Photo
Gallery as well.
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