WORLD GRASSES DATABASE

A Database of Grass Species

The database contains morphological descriptions of some 9000 species coded in DELTA (DEscription Language for TAxonomy) format using approximately 1000 characters.

It can be used with INTKEY (a program for interactive identification and information retrieval) to generate printed descriptions of species and genera, list the occurrence of particular characters or character combinations, assist in key construction, and make identifications.

If you are running Windows 95/NT and have INTKEY version 5 installed, you may launch the World Grasses Database from your browser (the uncompressed datafile is c. 20 mb). This database was updated on the 19th February 1999 and contains 9593 species records.

The descriptions are mostly derived from published accounts with minimal herbarium checking. Assistance in improving their quality and developing the concept of a World Grass Flora would be welcomed.

The INTKEY 5 program by Mike Dallwitz , Toni Paine and Eric Zurcher may be downloaded from the DELTA website. For more information about DELTA, visit the DELTA webpages on the Biodiversity and Biological Collections Server

The following DOS utility programs written by Derek Clayton for handling large DELTA - format data sets are available from Kew: