To complete an online world Flora by 2020 rapid progress is required towards understanding the taxonomy and distributions of the world’s plants. This ambitious target set by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation is hampered by two facts; first, many species of seed plant remain poorly known and second, the process of improving taxonomy and discovering species is not well understood. Here I investigate in detail the taxonomy and process of species discovery in a genus of tropical plants, ...

Specimens of plants and animals preserved in museums are the primary source of verifiable data on the geographical and temporal distribution of organisms. Museum datasets are increasingly being uploaded to aggregated regional and global databases (e.g. the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; GBIF) for use in a wide range of analyses [ 1 ]. Thus, digitisation of natural history collections is providing unprecedented information to facilitate the study of the natural world on a global sc...