Stabilised Plant Names

The current ISTA List of Stabilised Plant Names represents the eighth edition of this work. Previous editions were completed and published in 1966, 1983, 1988, 2001, 2007, 2013 and 2019. Individual names on the List are to be stabilised for a period of at least six years. After a 13-year hiatus following the 1988 edition, numerous changes were made for the 2001 edition. As a result, the ISTA Nomenclature Committee thereafter refrained from proposing changes to any name, regardless of its initial date of stabilisation, until the 2007 edition. With this 2025 edition, we are continuing the regular cycle of publication established for the last four editions. 

Although only six years have elapsed, many changes or adjustments in nomenclature for the plants treated here have occurred. These mostly result from recent advancements in taxonomic classification or from the nomenclatural actions of an International Botanical Congress, the latter reflected in the 2018 International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (Shenzhen Code) (ICN) adopted by the 2017 Shenzhen Congress (N.J. Turland et al., Regnum Vegetabile 159, Koeltz Botanical Books, 2018). This Code will be superseded by the rules adopted at the 2024 Madrid Congress. 

In preparation for this new edition, requests for proposed additions were announced at annual meetings, and several hundred scientific names were submitted for consideration. Additionally, several reports containing items for possible change from the previous edition were prepared by the Nomenclature Committee Chair, by consulting the taxonomic data of the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) and checking the World Flora Online and Plants of the World Online databases. These reports were made available to Committee members via email and included the following possible changes: 

• Approximately 375 names from the International Rules for Seed Testing (ISTA Rules), etc., to be added to the Stabilised List; 

• Four names with spelling changes between GRIN and the Stabilised List; 

• Twenty-eight names with changes to authors from the Stabilised List; 

• Approximately 150 nomenclatural or taxonomic changes to the Stabilised List. The items included in these reports were evaluated individually and voted on by Nomenclature Committee members. From these results, a document containing the ‘Proposed Changes to the ISTA List of Stabilised Plant Names’, approved by Committee vote, was submitted to and approved by the 33rd ISTA Congress in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2025. 

The approved list includes changes to names for 183 entries, or around 6% of the 3044 entries that were included in the Seventh Edition of the Stabilised List. They involve three spelling changes; 19 changes to authorship of names; acceptance of 23 names formerly treated as synonyms; change of 26 names from ‘included in’ another name to being merely synonyms; and reduction of 68 formerly accepted names to synonymy. In addition, 226 new accepted names and 102 new synonyms are included in the Eighth Edition, for a total of 511 updates (15% overall change).