Australian Plant Name Index
Lindy Cayzer, Laurie Adams, Kirsten Cowley, Brendan Lepschi and Greg Whitbread
Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, GPO Box 1600, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601
The Australian Plant Name Index (APNI), is a comprehensive database of published names of Australian vascular plants, now available on-line at: www.anbg.gov.au/apni. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature has strict rules on the publication and priority of plant names and must be very carefully considered in any revision involving new plant names and name changes. In Australia we have an enormous heritage of taxonomic literature in many languages and from many sources, and much of this literature is not readily available either here or overseas. To assist clients needing this information, the Australian Academy of Science Standing Committee for a Flora of Australia set up the Australian Plant Name Index project in 1973, supervised by Nancy T.Burbidge AM (1912–77). The first compiler was Penelope Hack, succeeded in 1974 by Arthur D.Chapman, but a number of botanists assisted especially during the early years. A four-volume, hard copy edition was published by the Australian Biological Resources Study [ABRS] in 1991 (Chapman, 1991). This contained the bibliographic and typification details for more than 60,000 Australian plant names.
