In 2019, the organisation had 2,316,699 public visitors at Kew, and 312,813 at Wakehurst.[5] Its 326-acre (132 ha) site at Kew has 40 historically important buildings; it became aUNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.[6] The collections at Kew and Wakehurst include over 27,000taxa of living plants,[7] 8.3 million plant and fungal herbarium specimens[8] and over 2.4 billion seeds collected from nearly 40,000 species in the Millennium Seed Bank.[9]
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew states that its mission is to apply scientific discovery and research to fully develop the information about and potential uses of plants and fungi.[10]
A conference held in 1976 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was important as it established a co-ordinating body in order to determine which threatened plants are in cultivation and where they are located which played a role in plant conservation.[11]
More than 470 scientists work for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.[13] The Director of Science isAlexandre Antonelli.[14] The Deputy Directors are Elizabeth Gardner, Paul Kersey andMonique Simmonds.[15]
Plants of the World Online is an online database launched in March 2017 as one of nine strategic outputs with the ultimate aim being "to enable users to access information on all the world's knownseed-bearing plants by 2020". It linkstaxonomic data with images from the collection, to provide a single point of access with information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses.[18]
The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) includes information from theIndex Kewensis, a project which began in the 19th century to provide an "Index to the Names and Authorities of all known flowering plants and their countries".[19] TheHarvard University Herbaria and theAustralian National Herbarium co-operate with Kew in the IPNI database, which was launched in its present form in 1999 to produce an authoritative source of information onbotanical nomenclature including publication details of seed plants,ferns andlycophytes. It is a nomenclatural listing of all published taxonomic plant names including new species, new combinations and new names at rank ofbotanical family down to infraspecific. It provides data for other related projects includingTropicos and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).[20]
The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) is a register of accepted scientific names and synonyms of 200 selected seed plant families. WCSP is widely used, and most authoritative web resources on plants use it as their basis.[24][20]
The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) includes all knownvascular plant species (flowering plants,conifers,ferns,clubmosses, andfirmosses). It is derived from the WCSP and the IPNI and therefore only includes names found in those databases. It is the taxonomic database for Plants of the World Online. Since WCSP includes only selected families, WCVP will seek to complete the process.[25][20][26]
The World Checklist of Useful Plant Species lists 40,292 species, including nine non-plant taxa (e.g.nostoc,forkweed,brown algae), compiled from multiple pre-existing datasets.[27][clarification needed]
Kew also cooperated with theMissouri Botanical Garden and other international bodies inThe Plant List (TPL). Unlike the IPNI, it provides information on which names are currently accepted. The Plant List is anInternet encyclopedia project which was launched in 2010 to compile a comprehensive list ofbotanical nomenclature.[28] The Plant List has records for 1,064,035 scientific names for plant species, representing 350,699 accepted plant species. In addition, the list has records for 642 plant families and 17,020 plant genera. It was last updated in 2013, and was superseded byWorld Flora Online.[29][30]
