World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions

The World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) is a biogeographical system developed by the international Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) organization, formerly the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases. The WGSRPD standards, like other standards for data fields in botanical databases, were developed to promote "the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the world's heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large". The system provides clear definitions and codes for recording plant distributions at four scales or levels, from "botanical continents" down to parts of large countries. Current users of the system include the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN), and the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP).

Principles of organization

The scheme is one of a number developed by Biodiversity Information Standards particularly aimed at taxonomic databases. The starting point was the "need for an agreed system of geographical units at approximately 'country' level and upwards for use in recording plant distributions". The scheme represents a compromise between political and botanical divisions. All boundaries either follow a political boundary (country boundary, province boundary, etc.), or coastlines. The scheme also aims to follow botanical tradition, in terms of the distribution categories used in works like the Flora Europaea, Flora Malesiana, or Med-Checklist. This approach occasionally leads to departures from political boundaries. Thus the scheme follows Flora Europaea in placing the eastern Aegean islands (such as Lesbos, Samos and Rhodes) in the West Asia region, rather than in Europe where they belong politically as part of Greece.