About the Portal

World Checklist of Food Plants

The World Checklist of Food Plants 2026 is the most comprehensive global inventory of plant taxa used as food by humans, spanning both cultivated taxa and wild plants traditionally gathered for food.

This portal provides a structured environment for exploring food plant diversity across geography, taxonomy, and species characteristics. It is intended as a reference resource for researchers, conservation practitioners, policymakers, and all users interested in how food plant diversity is documented and distributed worldwide.

Plant taxa: 26,622
Genera: 5,009
Families: 412

Data availability

Download the dataset

The complete checklist behind this portal is deposited on figshare under a persistent DOI. It is the same data the portal serves, published openly and citable.

Get the data on figshare

Licence: CC BY 4.0
Archive: data-and-code.zip · 176 MB
Deposit version: Version 2 · August 2026

Cite the dataset as

Diazgranados, Mauricio; Gianella, Maraeva; Kor, Laura; Gori, Benedetta; Khoury, Colin K.; Gora, Sarah L.; et al. (2026). World Checklist of Food Plants 2026 (WCFP): Data. figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31441615.v2

Contents

What the checklist records

Every taxon here has a documented human food use — that is the criterion for inclusion, so all 26,622 qualify. Everything below describes that set.

Taxonomic scope

26,622 accepted records — 26,419 species, 201 hybrids and 2 graft-chimaerae — across 5,009 genera, 412 families, 109 orders, 17 classes and 5 phyla. Counts on this portal are taxa unless stated otherwise.

892 are cultivated taxa and 1,825 are edible crop wild relatives; a taxon may be either, both or neither.

Geographic coverage

376,373 records place 25,435 taxa across 367 TDWG Level 3 areas, each classified by occurrence status.

277,848 native
97,799 introduced
277 extinct
449 doubtful

Uses recorded in addition to human food

A taxon may fall into several of these, or none. They are counts within the checklist, not a breakdown of it.

Portal Guide

How to navigate the portal

The portal offers two main ways to explore the checklist. You can start from the map to examine food plant diversity by area, or from taxonomy to browse the checklist through botanical classification and associated traits.

Map

Explore food plant diversity by geographic area through TDWG Level 3 regions, compare countries and territories, and examine the regional distribution of food plant richness.

Taxonomy

Browse the checklist through botanical classification and traits, moving from higher taxonomic ranks to family, genus, and species-level information.

Glossary and Data Notes

This guide explains the main categories, trait labels, and distribution notes used throughout the portal so that the checklist can be interpreted consistently.

Use categories

Plant uses are classified following the Economic Botany Data Collection Standard (Cook, 1995)¹, using a simplified categorisation adapted from the World Checklist of Useful Plant Species (Diazgranados et al., 2020)².

Every taxon in the checklist has a documented human food use — that is the criterion for inclusion. Plants consumed by humans as raw food (cereals, pseudocereals, pulses, fruits, starches, vegetables, nuts) or as processed food (food additives, gums, oils, resins, sugars), together with those used as spices and as ingredients in beverages. The nine categories below record uses documented in addition to it, and each has a badge used throughout the portal:

Icon	Category	Definition
	Animal Food	Plants used as feed or fodder for livestock, poultry, or other domesticated animals, including pasture grasses and supplementary feed.
	Medicine	Plants with documented therapeutic or pharmacological applications in traditional or modern medicine, used to treat, prevent, or alleviate human ailments.
	Materials	Plants providing raw materials for construction, textile fibres, paper, rubber, resins, dyes, and other non-food industrial applications.
	Fuel	Plants used as a source of energy, including firewood, charcoal, and biomass for combustion or biofuel production.
	Gene Sources	Plants of significance as genetic resources for crop breeding and improvement, including wild relatives of cultivated species and species with traits of potential agronomic value.
	Poisons	Plants containing toxic compounds used or documented in the context of pest control, hunting, or as sources of biocides and pesticides.
	Invertebrate Food	Plants that serve as host or food source for economically or ecologically important invertebrates, including insects used for honey production, silk, or other products.
	Environmental Uses	Plants used for ecosystem services, land management, or environmental restoration, including nitrogen-fixing species, windbreaks, erosion control, and ornamentals.
	Social Uses	Plants with cultural, ritual, recreational, or psychoactive significance, including species used in ceremonies or for non-medicinal psychoactive purposes.

Life form

Life form refers to the overall growth habit and structural form of a plant species, reflecting its adaptation to the environment. Life form categories used in this portal follow standard botanical classifications and include: trees (woody plants with a single main stem reaching over 5 m), shrubs (multi-stemmed woody plants generally under 5 m), herbs (non-woody or weakly woody plants), climbers/lianas (plants that use other structures for support), and succulents (plants with water-storing tissues), among others.

Cultivated taxa and Crop Wild Relatives (CWR)

Crop Wild Relatives are wild plant taxa closely related to cultivated crops that represent a critical reservoir of genetic diversity for crop improvement and food security. In this portal, CWR status follows the GRIN-Global CWR database³^,4 integrated with the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP)⁵. Taxa were classified as cultivated or as CWR by retaining only records with an assigned gene pool or graftstock designation in GRIN-Global. Food plant taxa with CWR status and documented food uses are referred to as edible CWR.

CWR are classified according to their hybridization potential with crops using the gene pool framework:

Category	Definition
Primary gene pool (GP-1)	Wild or weedy forms of the same biological species as the crop; gene transfer is straightforward and hybrids are generally fertile.
Secondary gene pool (GP-2)	Closely related species where hybridization is possible but hybrid fertility is reduced and gene transfer more difficult.
Tertiary gene pool (GP-3)	More distantly related species for which gene transfer requires advanced biotechnological techniques such as embryo rescue or somatic hybridization.
Graftstock	Species used as rootstocks for grafting with the cultivated crop, relevant for their indirect agronomic utility.

Plant distribution data

Plant distribution data are sourced from the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP)⁵; areas of cultivation are not included. Geographic units follow the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) at Level 3 (TDWG3)⁶, a standardised system widely used in botanical literature to define botanical countries and regions. Where a TDWG3 area corresponds to a single sovereign nation, the respective ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes are provided to facilitate interoperability. For TDWG3 areas that encompass more than one country (e.g. former political units or multi-island regions), ISO codes are not assigned and all constituent countries are listed, separated by "/".

Sources 6

1 Cook FEM (1995). Economic Botany Data Collection Standard. Prepared for the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences (TDWG). Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
2 Diazgranados M, Allkin B, Black N, et al. (2020). World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity.
3 Global Crop Diversity Trust, Bioversity International & USDA Agricultural Research Service (2025). GRIN-Global Server.
4 Wiersema JH & Leon B (2016). The GRIN Taxonomy crop wild relative inventory. In: Maxted N, Dulloo ME & Ford-Lloyd BV (eds.), Enhancing Crop Genepool Use. CAB International.
5 World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP). Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
6 Brummitt RK (2001). World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, 2nd edition. International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences (TDWG).

Contributors

The team behind WCFP

The World Checklist of Food Plants is made possible by an international group of researchers and partner institutions contributing botanical, geographic, and data expertise.