Primary botanical index: WCUPS 2020
The base plant index is the World Checklist of Useful Plant Species, produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The complete checklist is bundled and imported—not only the medicinal subset.
Traditional-use layer: USDA Dr. Duke
The Global Remedy Atlas is built from the ethnobotanical table in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dr. Duke Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases. The bundled normalized export contains 82,873 preserved observations, aggregated into approximately 68,000 unique plant/use associations and more than 2,200 documented use terms.
USDA makes the database searchable by scientific or common name and allows result export in spreadsheet form. Its official About page places the database contents under a Creative Commons CC0 public-domain dedication.
Open the official USDA database ↗ Licence and citation ↗
What a traditional-use record means
Each public atlas page represents a plant name associated with a source use term in one or more preserved ethnobotanical rows. Geography and reference labels are retained separately. Repeated rows are counted rather than silently turned into an efficacy score.
A record is historical documentation, not a recommendation. It does not establish identity of the plant material, plant part, preparation, dose, route, effectiveness, interactions, pregnancy safety or suitability for self-treatment. Poison, toxic, abortifacient, psychoactive, pesticidal and veterinary records are retained as data and visibly classified instead of being hidden.
USDA’s own disclaimer applies
The source database warns that its material was gathered from literature, can contain errors or omissions and should be checked against the original references. Herbal Remedy Source therefore exposes provenance and safety boundaries and never converts these associations into treatment instructions.
Fields retained from the source layers
The plant import preserves taxonomy, scientific authorship, identifiers, use-category flags, crop-wild-relative status and contributing source codes. The remedy import preserves the source row key, use term, scientific and common plant names, family, country or region, short and long reference labels, effective-note field and the untouched row payload.
The public index aggregates exact plant/use pairs for navigation while all underlying observations remain available to the record page and internal audit tools.
Separate enrichment and linking layers
Common names, aliases, accepted-name matching, synonyms, vernacular names, GBIF identifiers and Wikidata identifiers are stored separately from the original WCUPS record. Remedy records are linked to herbarium taxa when scientific-name matching is unambiguous. Enrichment never overwrites preserved source data.
Medicinal naming reference
Kew’s Medicinal Plant Names Services is used as an authoritative research reference for medicinal nomenclature and name ambiguity. Its portal is not scraped wholesale into this project. The distributable botanical baseline remains WCUPS, with controlled GBIF and Wikidata enrichment.
Required citations and licences
Diazgranados, M. et al. (2020). World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity.
WCUPS is reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. 1992–2016. Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases. DOI: 10.15482/USDA.ADC/1239279.
The USDA database contents are made available under a Creative Commons CC0 public-domain dedication. The bundled import file is a normalized CSV representation of the ethnobotanical table; provenance and file hashes are stored in the import log.
Herbal Remedy Source is an independent project and is not endorsed by the source institutions.
Editorial crawler sources remain internal
Dataset attribution belongs on methodology and atlas pages. It does not reintroduce crawler source-site names or raw “Research inputs” on public editorial articles.