Australian Plant Name Index - APNI

Maintained by the Australian National Botanic Gardens as part of its larger IBIS database, in collaboration with the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research and the Australian Biological Resources Study.

About the Australian Plant Name Index (APNI)

APNI is a tool for the botanical community that deals with plant names and their usage in the scientific literature, whether as a current name or synonym. APNI does not recommend any particular taxonomy or nomenclature. For a listing of currently accepted scientific names for the Australian vascular flora, see the Australian Plant Census (APC). Information available from APNI includes:

Scientific plant names;
Author details;
Original publication details (protologue), with links to a PDF in some cases via a book-icon
Subsequent usage of the name in the scientific literature (in an Australian context)
Typification details;
An APC-tick-icon showing which, if any, concept has been accepted for the APC
State distribution (from the Australian Plant Census (APC));
Relevant comments and notes;
Links to other information such as plant distributions, descriptions and images via a camera-icon where available.

APNI is maintained at the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research with staff, resources and financial support from the Australian National Herbarium, Australian National Botanic Gardens and the Australian Biological Resources Study. The CANBR, ANBG and ABRS collaborate to further the updating and delivery of APNI and APC.

In recent years APNI has also incorporated names for cultivars derived from the Australian flora

Search the APNI database

APNI Search

History of APNI

books: Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) The Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) was the inspiration of one of Australia's most prominent botanists, Dr Nancy Burbidge. It was compiled over a period of 15 years from literature in herbaria and botanical libraries around the world, and published in 1991 as a 4-volume set of 3,055 pages, treating over 60,000 names. Originally compiled by Mr Arthur Chapman of the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), the underlying database of APNI was transferred to the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG) in 1991 as its foundation dataset, and as a public-good Internet resource.

Following the formation of the collaborative Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, (now CANBR) in 1993, APNI was adopted as the standard dataset for plant names for the Australian National Herbarium, and as a key resource for the Flora of Australia program of ABRS.

Dr Burbidge (left), the published APNI volumes (right)

List of all Australian plant names

Be careful - these link to very large files

Search engines will not find plant names hidden in a database. To overcome this problem the links below are to full lists, by alphabet, of all the names known to have been used for Australian plants up until 2003, it is linked here mainly for search engines. It is NOT a checklist of the Australian flora - many of the names are synonyms, making a total list of over 65,000 names for a flora estimated at about 20,000 species.

Total plant name list for Australia (7,203 KB)

GROWING AUSTRALIAN PLANTS

ACT (CANBERRA) REGION