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Using GRIN Taxonomy

GRIN Taxonomy focuses on economically important plants from around the world and is actively maintained by USDA taxonomists. We recommend aligning with GRIN Taxonomy instead of curating your own taxonomic database.

When registering accessions, one of the required fields in GGCE is the accession’s Taxon. The user does not simply type a taxon in a field, but selects the taxon from a list of available names.

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You may contact USDA taxonomists if you need to include or vet additional taxonomy names in the database.

New GGCE databases do not come with a taxonomic database pre-installed. When pre-existing GRIN-Global databases are converted to GGCE, their taxonomy data is likely out of date. Considering that updates to GRIN Taxonomy are periodically released by USDA, we recommend updating your copy on a regular basis.

This document explains how to keep your GGCE synchronized with the GRIN Taxonomy database.

Why GRIN Taxonomy?​

USDA’s GRIN Taxonomy focuses on economically important plants from around the world. Economic uses, common names, and native distributions are included for many species. Though the emphasis is on major, minor, or potential crops and their wild and weedy relatives, many other categories of plants are represented including ornamentals and some rare and endangered plants.

Included in the GRIN Taxonomy are scientific names for 29,000+ genera (16,000+ are accepted names) and 134,000+ species with common names, geographical distributions, literature references, and economic importance.

Generally recognized standards for abbreviating authors' names and botanical literature have been adopted. The scientific names are verified, in accordance with the international rules of botanical nomenclature, by taxonomists of the USDA National Germplasm Resources Laboratory using available taxonomic literature and consultations with taxonomic specialists. GRIN also provides the description of abbreviations and symbols used within the taxonomic data.

The GRIN Taxonomy database includes the names that are used by the majority of crop genebanks, and is the preferred source of names for GGCE users.

Loading the GRIN Taxonomy database​

We recommend that the taxonomic database is refreshed every few months (or by user demand):

  1. Login to GGCE Server,
  2. Open Administration pages to manage your GGCE instance,
  3. In the USDA GRIN data section, click Update GRIN Taxonomy button,
  4. The update procedure takes quite some time to complete, so please be patient.

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GGCE will download the most recent available copy of GRIN Taxonomy database. If this is the first install of GRIN Taxonomy, all records will be imported to the local database, making them available for use. On subsequent runs, the names that were previously imported from GRIN will be updated accordingly, keeping them in sync with changes made by USDA taxonomists.

Any records that were added to the local taxonomic database by you and other users may be updated to match their curated counterparts in GRIN Taxonomy!

It is possible, although unlikely, that species name records would be fundamentally modified (i.e. describe a completely different species). GGCE keeps track of modifications to taxonomic records and you may review them in the GGCE Audit Logs section.