The database contains photographs of African plants from all regions of the continent and surrounding islands.

You can search for scientific or vernacular names (or parts thereof, no wildcard necessary) via the free text quick search.

You can browse through an alphabetical list of species and infraspecific taxa.

You can select several morphological characters in combination with genera, families or higher taxa and will get a result list of species matching these criteria.

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 information for character coding is taken from the literature and 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 approximate and includes only easily visible or easily accessible features.

If you want to link to our site using a URL with taxon names, you can construct the URL following this example: https://africanplants.senckenberg.de/search/quick?full_text=Adansonia+digitata

Help us identify!

Some photographs are not identified to species. You find them via searching for “indet.”. If you have suggestions, please let us know. Likewise, if you notice a misidentification, your feedback would help us improve the photo guide.

Contribute!

We welcome quality plant photos from Africa, especially those documenting species previously not represented, or providing missing details of a species. With the photos, we need some additional information on locality, which can be supplied in tabular form or directly in the EXIF/IPTC metatags, e.g. by using Geosetter or comparable tools.

Standards

Nomenclature: Use of species and family names generally follows the African Plant Database (APD).

Geography: Use of plants occurrences in geographical regions generally follows the TDWG World Geographical Scheme for recording plant distributions, ed. 2.

Language abbreviations: Use of abbreviations generally follows language codes after ISO 639-1.