This website provides a commented list of online searchable databases on medicinal plants and other useful plant species.
The website provides herbal information on more than 800 medicinal plants with comprehensive text entries based on the book „A Modern Herbal“, first published in 1931 by Mrs. M. Grieve. It contains information on common names, distributions, habitats, descriptions, medicinal actions and uses, and dosages.
Agroforestry Species Switchboard
The Agroforestry Species Switchboard retrieves data about a particular plant species from a range of 35 web-based information sources. It provides information on trees and tree-based development activities such as agroforestry planting and wider restoration initiatives.
AgroForestryTree Database. World Agroforestry Center
The database provides information on 670 agroforestry trees. It provides data on the distribution, uses, ecology, management, and propagation of both native and exotic tree species.
Customary Medicinal Knowledgebase – CMKb
The website presents medicinal plant knowledge possessed by the Australian Aboriginal people. It contains information on common and community names, distribution, uses, medicinal properties, and images.
Dr. Dukes Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases
The website provides phytochemical information for some 2.300 plants. It is searchable by scientific or common name, chemicals, activity, or medicinal use.
The database provides information for >2000 plant species and allows to identify plant species for given environments and uses. It includes species data on life form, growth habit, plant part used and the plant’s main use (food, fodder or pasture, green manure, energy, fibre, timber, paper pulp, shelter and shade, industrial purposes, erosion control, ornamental). The application was discontinued around 2015.
This portal includes information about plants, animals and areas. It includes common and scientific names, distributions, habitats, ecology, taxonomy, photos and uses. It provides a variety of search characters like e.g food product , non-food product, medicinal plant, crop plant, forestry plant, weed plant, or vegetation type.
The website presents brief information about food sources not usually considered as crops but may be consumed in times of famine. It includes about 1,200 species. Data sheets provide country related uses, common names, photos and a location map.
The website comprises 117 species used in international cuisine for spices and herbs. It includes information on common names in different languages, uses, plant parts used, distribution, main constituents, etymology, and photos.
Heilpflanzen & Heilkräuter-Lexikon
The German website provides herbal information on 143 European medicinal plants. It includes short descriptions, information on distribution, and pharmacology.
The German website presents herbal information on 239 plant drugs. Factsheets provide short descriptions on distribution, uses, and photos.
The German website provides herbal information on about 190 medicinal plants. It contains descriptions, distributions, uses, active ingredients, and many photos. Last updated 2016.
This website provides literature references with herbal information on a large number of medicinal plants. It contains information about common names (in 50 languages), diseases, uses, and ingredients.
Mansfeld World Database of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops
The website is a standard source of information on cultivated plants, dealing with 6,100 crop plant species (except ornamental and forestry plants). It provides information on scientific nomenclature, common names, distribution, cultivation, uses, chemical components, photos, and literature references.
The website provides herbal information on several hundred medicinal plants. The data sheets contain information on scientific and common names, description, habitat, active ingredients, and uses.
Medicinal Plant Names Services
MPNS is a global nomenclatural indexing and reference service for medicinal plants. Version 11 was published in Dec 2021 and includes scientific, pharmaceutical, trade and common names used for medicinal plants or herbal substances reported to have medicinal use drawn from 199 pharmaceutical or medicinal plant publications covering 34,408 angiosperm or gymnosperm plants.
The website provides information on native and naturalized useful plants of the Mediterranean region. All information is broken down to country level. It covers common names, conservation, trade and habitat information, distribution, use, and ecology information. The classes of use included are food, food additives, animal food, bee plants, food for invertebrates, materials, fuels, social uses, vertebrate poisons, non-vertebrate poisons, medicines, environmental uses, and gene
The website provides information on uses of plants as foods, drugs, dyes, and fibers by native north American peoples. It includes 4,029 species, about half of them medicinal (as of 2003).
The database provides access to information on fruits from the New World, including data on common names, uses, and distribution. As of September 2004 the database holds information on 1,253 species.
PFAF consists of more than 7,000 species of edible and medicinal plants. Focus is on plants suitable for growing outdoors in a temperate climate. The data sheetes include uses, plant parts in use, cultivation, synonyms, common names and distribution.
Prelude Medicinal Plants Database
The website presents the use of traditional veterinarian and human medicinal plants in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. Search results include references with traditional medicine applications for various ailments. Last updated 2021.
PROTA4U focusses on plant species used by man in tropical Africa. The data sheets contain detailed information on taxonomy, common names, cultivation, distribution, habitat, ethnobotany, nomenclature, uses, and harvesting.
Raintree Tropical Plant Database
The website provides data sheets of 209 medicinal plant species native to or cultivated in the Amazonas area. The species sheets contains data on taxonomy, common names, plant part used, phytochemical information, ethnobotany, and uses in traditional medicine systems.
„The TRAMIL Library is dedicated to the photos, scans, drawings, plants herbarium, and 100 monographs of the 360 Caribbean medicinal plants selected by the TRAMIL network.“
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by Uwe Schippmann, 25.1.2023