Community & Contributions

How the data gets here, and how to add to it.

This database is an aggregation: almost nothing in it originates here. The records come from herbaria, sequencing laboratories and published revisions. There is no discussion board on this site, and no user-submitted content is displayed as if it were community activity — what follows is the set of routes that actually add data to it.

Contributing data

• Specimen and occurrence records — published to GBIF through an institutional IPT, then picked up by the monthly sync. See the GBIF publishing guide.
• DNA sequences — submitted to NCBI GenBank and attached to species records by the weekly sync.
• Photographs — sourced from GBIF media records and contributing herbaria, always with the original licence intact.
• Literature and taxonomic corrections — send a DOI for a missing paper, or a published source that supersedes a name or distribution we show.

Reporting a problem with a record

A wrong record is more damaging than a missing one, so corrections take priority. To make a report actionable, include the URL or the GBIF or GenBank identifier, what is currently shown, what it should say, and the published source that supports the correction.

Email contact@melastomataceae.org with the subject line "Record correction". See the corrections policy for how reports are handled.

Where the wider community works

Identification requests are better served by communities built for them. iNaturalist carries the largest open set of Melastomataceae observations, and identifiers who work on the family respond there. Occurrence data is stewarded by GBIF, sequence data by NCBI GenBank, and nomenclatural questions by Plants of the World Online.