WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online Taxonomic Backbone data

ABSTRACT Premise of the study Standardization of plant names is a critical step in various fields of biology including biodiversity, biogeography and vegetation research. WorldFlora matches lists of plant names with a static copy from World Flora Online (WFO), an ongoing global effort of completing an online flora of all known vascular plants and bryophytes by 2020. Methods and results Based on direct and fuzzy matching, WorldFlora inserts matching cases from the WFO to a submitted data set of with taxa. Results of selecting the expected best single matches are presented for four data sets, including a working list of commercial timber tree species, a subset from GlobalTreeSearch and 2 data sets used in previous comparisons of software tools for correcting taxon names. The success rate of credible matches varied from 94.7 (568 taxa) to 99.9 (1740 taxa) percent. Conclusions WorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi-automatic plant name checking.