West African Plants
A Photo Guide
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Help & User's Guide
The database contains photographs of plants from West Africa in a broad geographical sense, mainly from the savanna regions.
- You can search for scientific or vernacular names (or parts thereof, no wildcard necessary) via free text (in: “What are you looking for”)
- You can browse through a taxonomic hierarchy starting with family names.
- You can select several morphological characters and will get a result list of species we have encoded to have these characters.
The search is filtered according to the chosen character states. Chosen character states for the same character are combined with a logical “OR”, returning a list of plants with any of the chosen character states (flowers, e.g., may be red OR yellow).
Different characters, however, are combined with a logical “AND”, returning a list of plants, where the character states fit the selections for every character (e.g., only plants, with red flowers AND entire leaf margins).
Please note that the informations for character coding are taken from the literature and that not all of these characters will be visible on the photographs.
The photo guide is an aid to identification but cannot substitute an identification key. Definition of characters is rough and includes only easily visible or accessible features.
Help us to identify!
Some photographs of plants are not identified to species. You find them via searching for the epithet “indet.”. If you have suggestions, please let us know.
Nomenclature
Use of species and family names follows the African Plants Database (APD)