The KIT Botanical Garden in Karlsruhe remains a close partner to our projects for over 20 years. They supported us in every possible way, allowed photographing and hosted our previous website since 2004 on the servers of KIT.
Also, the garden participates in rescue and propagation projects for rare and endangered regional plants, like Apium graveolens or local Taraxacum palustre agg. species. The cooperate closely with local conservancy organizations.
Currently the KIT Botanical Garden goes - like many German botanical gardens - through difficult times, being forced to relocate to a smaller site and being closed to the public due to understaffing and COVID-19. We hope that those issues can be solved soon!
From 2012 onwards, the staff of Catalogue of Life contacted us to gather checklists and data for ferns and flora. Especially through Yury Roskov, we built over the years a cordial and close relationship and support the Catalogue of Life with data.
As of today, about 60% of the flora data (almost 200.000 species) of Catalogue of Life comes directly from worldplants.de. The data are transferred in regular updates several times per year.
From Catalogue of Life onwards, data are then shared with GBIF and other worldwide leading databases.
We have provided the taxon list, complete with higher classification and synonymy relationships, that underlies the Pteridophyte Collections Consortium (PCC) pteridoportal (https://pteridophytes.berkeley.edu/). The PCC is providing free online access to over 2 million fossil and extant pteridophyte specimens (ferns, lycophytes, and their extinct seed-free relatives), and the World Plants data allows that resource to be easily sortable, mappable, and analyzable taxonomically.
Thanks to Carl Rothfels and colleagues for a fruitful partnership!
The "Florenliste" of Germany is a long-time project, meticulously curated by Karl-Peter Buttler (deceased), Ralf Hand and colleagues. It contains the most complete list of infraspecific taxa for any region in Europe. All the old names have been individually cross-checked by the authors, going back to the old literature and clarifying much obscure taxonomy.
The authors of the Florenliste gave their permission to transfer data into WorldPlants, and we are very thankful for this.
The Botanical Garden Heidelberg still hosts one of the preeminent orchid collections in the world, which was built up over more than 50 years.
The garden cooperated with us mostly in the early 2000s and allowed us to photograph all available orchid species, which formed the core of our orchid slide collection. The curator Karlheinz Senghas (†) built himself a formidable collection of slides during the 1980s and 1990s (see history of World Orchids). Many of those slides are in the meantime published in the internet, but were scanned by us from 1999 to 2004. This enabled us to add many almost unknown species to our slide collection.
Selby Gardens is extremely active in orchid research and hosts one of the biggest scientific orchid collections.
Especially in the early 2000s and helped by the experts Carl Luer and Stig Dalström, we were able and allowed to photograph a lot of orchids in their collections.
Being one of the largest orchid growers in the world, Andys Orchids has a collection of over 7000 species. In the mid 2000s, Michael Hassler visited several times and photographed a great number of orchids.
Additionally, Andys Orchids provided copies of their own extensive orchid slide collection containing magnificent photos of carefully determined species, which form today a core of our orchid photograph collection.
Ralf did live in Taiwan for many years and became the leading expert of Taiwan ferns. He wrote several monographs, checklists and books.
From 2014 onwards until his return to Germany in 2019, Ralf provided copies of his magnificent slide collection of Taiwan ferns to us. With almost 800 species this remains the biggest part of our fern slide collection. Also he revised checklists and data for us.