Plant Data Sources

Kepthouse's plant species catalogue and care recommendations are assembled from a mixture of open data, permissively licensed datasets, and hand-curated entries. This page lists every source used, its licence, and how it's attributed inside the app.

Non-affiliation: Kepthouse is not affiliated with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the Met Office, GBIF, Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation, or any of the other projects listed below. Their names and data are used under open licences or fair-use attribution.

Taxonomic Backbone

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy

gbif.org · Licence: CC-BY 4.0

Backbone dataset of accepted plant species names, family classification, and synonyms. Around 350,000 vascular plant species are ingested into the Kepthouse server and used as the authoritative source for scientific name resolution.

Citation: GBIF Secretariat (2023). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset. https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei

Wikidata

wikidata.org · Licence: CC0 1.0

Reference data for taxon properties, multi-language common names, Wikimedia Commons images, and cross-references to other databases.

Species Summaries & Images

Wikipedia

wikipedia.org · Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0

Short descriptive summaries and plant image URLs used on the species info card. Image URLs reference Wikimedia Commons directly and are not rehosted.

Care Data & UK Garden Defaults

Kepthouse seed curation

Hand-compiled from public references; © Kepthouse

Care data (RHS hardiness rating, sunlight preference, watering frequency, soil pH range, flowering and pruning months, edibility flags) for roughly 50 popular UK garden species has been hand-curated by the developer from publicly available sources, including RHS online guidance and horticultural references. The compiled table is Kepthouse's own copyright; the underlying facts are not. Community corrections submitted through the app are reviewed manually and merged into this dataset.

UK frost dates

Source: RHS / Met Office regional averages (1991–2020 normals) · Licence: OGL 3.0 (underlying Met Office data)

Typical last-spring and first-autumn frost dates by UK postcode area, derived from publicly cited RHS regional averages based on Met Office climate normals. Covers all 124 UK postcode areas grouped into 15 climate regions. Approximate; not recommended for commercial horticultural planning.

What Kepthouse Does Not Scrape or Redistribute

Kepthouse does not scrape, rehost, or redistribute content from the RHS Plant Finder, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew databases, Gardeners' World, nursery catalogues, Thompson & Morgan, Orange Pippin, or any other copyright-protected plant database. Plant facts (e.g. "Bramley is a cooking apple pollination group 3") are not copyrightable in the UK, but curated compilations and editorial selections are — so those stay out.

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