Melastomataceae World Database
A comprehensive, open-access catalogue of the flowering plant family Melastomataceae — species accounts, distribution maps, occurrence records, DNA sequences, imagery and scientific literature.
What this site is for
Melastomataceae is one of the largest families of flowering plants, with around 5,000 species concentrated in the tropics. The literature describing them is scattered across two centuries of monographs, revisions and journal papers, and the specimen records sit in hundreds of separate herbaria. This database brings those strands into one place and adds what none of the sources publish on their own: per-genus roll-ups, coverage summaries and explicit statements about how complete the evidence for a species actually is.
What you can do here
- Browse the species database — every accepted species with its distribution, occurrence count, imagery and molecular coverage.
- Look at distribution maps — occurrence records mapped worldwide, with the caveats that collection bias imposes.
- Search GenBank sequences — ITS, rbcL, matK, trnL-trnF, ndhF and plastomes linked back to the species they were published under.
- Read the literature index — publications on Melastomataceae taxonomy, systematics, ecology and evolution.
- Read the blog — written explanations of the taxonomy, morphology and biogeography behind the data.
How much is in here
The database currently holds 6,837 species across 190 genera, 12,112 indexed DNA sequences and 173 curated literature records. Figures are recomputed on every rebuild, so a number shown here is the state of the data at the last sync, not a marketing estimate.
Where the data comes from
Accepted names and authorship are reconciled against Plants of the World Online (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Tropicos (Missouri Botanical Garden). Occurrence records come from GBIF. DNA sequences come from NCBI GenBank. Conservation assessments come from the IUCN Red List, and publication metadata from Crossref. Every record keeps its original identifier so it can be traced back to the dataset it came from.
Read the full data sources and curation methodology for the field-by-field breakdown, the refresh schedule and the known limits of the data.
Editorial standards
Articles are written and reviewed by the curators responsible for the taxa involved, and every factual claim is traceable to a published source. Our editorial and corrections policy sets out how that works, including how we handle automated drafting assistance and how errors are corrected.
Found something wrong? Tell us — corrections take priority over new additions.