International Plant Names Index (IPNI) Scraper

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Bulk-extract plant nomenclature records from IPNI (the International Plant Names Index — a collaboration between Kew Gardens, Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Botanic Gardens). IPNI is the authoritative global registry of published vascular plant names, covering over 1.7 million nomenclatural acts with full author provenance, protologue citations, and Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) scan links.

What you get

Each record includes:

Optional enrichment mode (enrich: true) fetches the per-record detail endpoint to add original_remarks and type_locations.

Input

{
"queries":["Quercus robur","Rosa canina"],
"recordType":"",
"enrich":false,
"maxItems":500
}

Use cases

• Biodiversity informatics pipelines — resolve plant name strings against the authoritative nomenclatural index and attach full author provenance.
• Herbarium digitisation — link specimen label names to IPNI records for authoritative citation and LSID anchoring.
• AI training datasets — build botanical-nomenclature corpora with publication year, author team, and BHL scan provenance for LLM training.
• Flora and checklist projects — bulk-retrieve name records for a genus or family with protologue citations and suppression flags.
• Citation graph research — extract the author-team + TL2 provenance layer that POWO/GBIF/USDA do not carry.

Notes

• The IPNI API is public with no authentication required.
• No proxy is used — direct requests at polite concurrency (400 ms between pages).
• Pagination is automatic: each query sweeps all available pages up to maxItems.
• enrich: true adds a second HTTP request per record — increase maxItems conservatively.
• IPNI covers vascular plants and some bryophytes; it is distinct from POWO (accepted taxonomy + distribution) and GBIF (occurrence data).