There is a huge amount of free and open data about plants in the world.
Unfortunately, “free and open” does not always mean “accessible”. On the contrary, it seems like most entities generating giant piles of potentially useful data about plants are content publishing a gargantuan and barely formatted data file to a website somewhere, checking the “we published all our data for free” box for the year, and calling it a day.
Someone really should try to make all that stuff usable.
Core principles
It benefits everyone on the planet if the maximum amount of plant-related data is available to as many people as possible, for free.
“Availability” means much more than “downloadable”. For the greatest benefit, plant data should be made rapidly understandable for a wide variety of people and potential uses. Because most people are neither trained botanists nor data scientists, we should not concentrate on either of these groups to start with.
Do not make the internet worse with things like ads, paywalls, and user tracking. It’s bad enough out there already.