I see there are numerous online Flora sites, COL, EOL, WCSP, POWO, and The Plant List among others. Would it possible to have one integrated online Flora database in the world. All the sites provide scientific names, distribution and other information. However, I still see there are some disagreements among the sites in taxon citation for some species, and in synonyms etc. I feel there should be consensus among the sites in taxon citation and synonyms at least or some sites are not updating for several years. This is my personal observation may be due lack of knowledge about sites and other shortcomings. Thank you.
Its possible with appropriate funding although there will always be disagreement among the scientific community
Since all the scientific communities use same nomenclature system, I feel there shouldn't be disagreements among the users. No separate site is required if the scientific communities of the existing flora sites are integrated and developed into one global plant database.
The same nomenclature system is used, but the taxonomic considerations can differ per scientist. This inherently has an effect on the way a nomenclaturist names a species which results, especially with some plant genera, in a lot of synonyms for 'the same' organism. For some plants, there is not even a consensus concerning the genus.
also, i am no expert in taxonomy or nomenclature, but with what i know for certain difficult (e.g. apomictic) genera, i don't think it is possible to create one large list without losing a lot of information concerning biodiversity.
I often use the international plant names index (one of the global plant name databases) to check for synonyms among other things. I think this is one of the most widely used checklists, also used in the GBIF database.
If you want to 'merge' synonyms, you can use the backbone function in GBIF (this is easy to do in R), but you always need to be carefull with interpretations.
As far as I could observe, most research articles cite ThePlantList.org as the standard database for plant nomenclature and citation. Despite ThePlantList is deprecated today (as they state themselves) and no longer developed or improved, and they recommend using http://www.worldfloraonline.org/, the latter is very invalid as it does not provide citations of taxonomical names. Due to this annoying lack, ThePlantList is still being cited as the standard data source.
I have used "The Plant list" quite often, after they have stopped updating, I shifted to Plants of World Online (POWO) now. I feel this site is also good.
WeDig Bio, The plant list, Index Fungorum, Species Fungorum and many more easily accessible sites are there. In many cities have their own institute sites for regional and national parks for digital flora's and fauna. Defenatly it will help you.
Definitely any information provided in the sites will help but why there is not consistency in some species.
For online e-flora (electronic flora) you can search for eflora china, eflora pakistan etc. I'm providing link
http://www.efloras.org › flora_page
Flora of China @ efloras.org
http://www.efloras.org › flora_page
Flora of Pakistan @ efloras.org