Species Database
Search and filter every Melastomataceae species in the database by genus, distribution, conservation status and available data.
The database currently holds 6,837 accepted species in 190 genera. Each species record carries the accepted name and authorship, the source of the original description, a country-level distribution derived from occurrence records, an elevation range, flower colour where recorded, the number of available images, and whether any sequence data exists for it.
Why the species count is not simply the number of pages
A record is listed here if the name is treated as accepted by the nomenclatural authorities we reconcile against. That includes many species known from very few collections. Rather than pad the index with thousands of pages that say nothing beyond a name, species whose underlying evidence is thin are kept browsable but are excluded from search engines, and figures such as occurrence counts make it obvious which records are well documented and which are not.
How to read a species record
- Occurrence records — the number of GBIF records with a determination to species rank and usable coordinates. A low number usually means under-collection, not rarity.
- Distribution — countries derived from those records. Absence of a country is not evidence that the species is absent there.
- Elevation range — taken from the recorded elevations of the specimens, and indicative rather than physiological.
- GenBank sequences — whether any sequence has been published under the name, and which loci.
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.
Downloadable tables, including a Darwin Core archive of the occurrence data, are on the downloads page.