The Leipzig Catalogue of Vascular Plants (LCVP) - An improved taxonomic reference list for all known vascular plants

The lack of comprehensive and standardized taxonomic reference information is an impediment for robust plant research, e.g. in systematics, biogeography or macroecology. Here we provide an updated and much improved reference list of 1,315,479 scientific plant taxa names for all described vascular plant taxa names globally. The Leipzig Catalogue of Vascular Plants (LCVP; version 1.0.2) contains 351.176 accepted species (plus 6.160 natural hybrids), within 13.422 genera, 561 families and 84 orders. The LCVP a) contains more information on the taxonomic status of global plant names than any other similar resource and b) significantly improves the reliability of our knowledge by e.g. resolving the taxonomic status of [~]184.000 taxa names compared to The Plant List, the up to date most commonly used plant name resource. We used [~]4500 publications, existing relevant databases and available studies on molecular phylogenetics to construct a robust reference backbone. For easy access and integration into automated data processing pipelines, we provide an R-package (lcvplants) with the LCVP.