Talk:Garcinia

Question

Isn't the correct name of Garcinia cambogia Garcinia gummi-gutta? Badagnani (talk) 21:18, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Please can you let me know if Garcinia cambogia and Garcinia travencorica the same . Please help

PC  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.71.151.174 (talk) 05:07, 18 May 2009 (UTC) 

G. travancorica does not seem to be the same thing (see [1]). The situation with G. cambogia & G. gummi-gutta is complicated. See Talk:Gambooge for further discussion.Plantdrew (talk) 20:56, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

G. brasiliensis or gardneriana?

Currently Wikipedia has G. brasiliensis as a redirect to G. gardneriana; however, The Plant List gives the first as an accepted name and the second as a synonym for the same species. Wouldn't it be better to rename the "gardneriana" page with the "brasiliensis" species name? yoyo (talk) 13:27, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

@Yahya Abdal-Aziz:, The Plant List is outdated. Plants of the World Online is more up-to-date and accepts both species. Plantdrew (talk)

@Plantdrew:, thanks for the info! I wasn't aware of POWO, so spent some time browsing and searching its databases. It certainly looks much more informative than TPL, too. As you wrote, it has both G. gardneriana and G. brasiliensis as accepted species names. I'm merely a keen amateur at botanising, but your moniker suggests that maybe you're a specialist. May I ask: how does one know that one source list is better — more up-to-date, more consilient etc. — than another? yoyo (talk) 02:47, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

@Yahya Abdal-Aziz:, look for a date? Some plant taxonomic databases show the dates that a particular species record was last edited. Others may have a FAQ or About page that indicates when it was last updated (for TPL, that is September 2013).

Different databases serve different purposes. The Plant List was the first attempt by multiple botanical institutions aroud the world to create a list of every accepted plant species. Kew botanical gardens collaborated with other institutions with The Plant List, but unilaterally produced POWO as an (interim?) successor to The Plant List. World Flora Online is intended to be the mult-institutional successor to The Plant List, but isn't yet ready for use in my opinion (in many groups of plants, it still has out-of-date data taken directly from The Plant List). TPL/POWO/WFO are the players in the global list of accepted plants game.

IPNI is the place to go if you want to confirm that a particular plant has been published (but it won't tell you whether it is considered a synonym). When there are multiple spellings of a name in the literature, GRIN often has more detail than IPNI when explaining which spelling is correct.

I looked at your profile to see if you had indicated where you are from. I haven't used the Australian databases enough to be aware of any idiosyncrasies or pitfalls they may have; but I have a generally good impression of them. Australian Plant Name Index aims to provide a list of every accepted plant species from Australia, and is updated regularly. Flora of Victoria uses the APNI framework, but provides more data and is updated regularly (individual records in APNI and VicFlora show their last update). There's also Flora of Australia Online and Florabase (for Western Australia). You might find that APNI differs from POWO in some places; it's not always easy to reconcile a regional list with a global list. Plantdrew (talk) 03:22, 1 November 2021 (UTC)