Research institutions and scientists
We integrate datasets, publish them under the source’s licence with attribution, and return the corrections gathered by the community. Bulk exports and higher rate limits are arranged case by case.
The plants API
Botanical data, open to everyone.
Trefle is an open botanical data source and REST API. It indexes about one million plants gathered from institutional sources and completed by hand by contributors. It is free for all.
Try it
Type a scientific or common name. The API answer appears as it is returned, and as a page would display it. No account needed here.
What is in the database
Trefle is still in beta. Some records are incomplete or not fully validated; missing values are labelled unknown rather than hidden.
Data is gathered from
and completed by hand by contributors around the world.
Recent changes
The database is not frozen. Contributors submit corrections every day; each one is reviewed before it is published.
- 66
- corrections submitted
- 0
- accepted and published
- 0
- fields completed
- 3
- contributors
Accepted corrections per week
12 weeks ago
this week
No corrections accepted in the last 12 weeks.
Latest reviewed
- Accepted Dietes bicolor — Update on growth_habit, average_height_value, and 14 other fields
- Accepted Philodendron hederaceum var. oxycardium — Update on average_height_value, average_height_unit, and 11 other fields
- Accepted Liriope spicata — Update on average_height_value, average_height_unit, and 15 other fields
- Accepted Monstera deliciosa — Update on flower_color, foliage_color, and 1 other fields
- Accepted Solanum lycopersicum — Update on minimum_temperature_deg_c, maximum_temperature_deg_c, and 1 other fields
For developers
A plain REST API returning JSON. 60 requests per minute for everyone, 600 for GitHub sponsors.
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01
Create an account, get a token
Your token allows you to make queries on the API. Keep it private.
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02
Make your first request
curl "https://trefle.io/api/v1/plants?token=YOUR_TOKEN"
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03
Read the reference
Endpoints for plants, species, genus, families, distributions and corrections, with filters, sorting and pagination.
Research and education
Trefle works with institutions that hold botanical data and with those who teach with it.
Schools and universities
Student projects, coursework and botany classes use the API free of charge. We try to support educational projects as much as we can: tell us what you are building.
Join the team
Trefle is run by a small volunteer team. There is work for developers, for people who care about data quality, and for anyone who knows plants.
Development
Rails API, React front end, import pipelines. Issues are open on GitHub and labelled by difficulty.
Data quality
Reconcile sources, review submitted corrections, detect duplicates and broken taxonomies.
Corrections
Any account can complete a species page: growth conditions, distribution, common names, images. No coding involved.
We need your support
Trefle is an Open Source API and the code & platform are provided totally free of charge. Donations help keep the servers running and allow us to dedicate more time to ongoing development.