The scientific names of organisms are key identifiers of plants and animals. Correctly treating scientific names is a prerequisite for biodiversity research and documentation. Here, we present an R package, \'U.Taxonstand\', which can standardize and harmonize scientific names in plant and animal species lists at a fast speed and at a high rate of matching success. Unlike most of other similar R packages each of which works with only one taxonomic database, U.Taxonstand can work with all taxonomic databases, as long as they are properly formatted. Multiple databases for plants and animals that can be directly used by U.Taxonstand, which include bryophytes, vascular plants, amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals, and reptiles, are available online. U.Taxonstand can be a very useful tool for botanists, zoologists, ecologists and biogeographers to standardize and harmonize scientific names of organisms.

OBJECTIVE: The standardization of plant names is a critical step in various fields of biology, including biodiversity, biogeography, and vegetation research. The WorldFlora package is introduced here to help achieve this goal by matching lists of plant names with a static copy from World Flora Online (WFO), an ongoing global effort to complete an online flora of all known vascular plants and bryophytes by 2020.
RESULTS: Based on direct and fuzzy matching, WorldFlora inserts matching cases from the WFO to a submitted data set containing taxonomic names. The results and success rates for selecting the expected best single matches are presented for four data sets, including two data sets used in recent comparisons of software tools for correcting taxon names.
CONCLUSIONS: WorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi-automatic plant name checking. For the four data sets, the success rate of credible matches ranged from 94.7% to 99.9%.