The pioneering International Legume Database and Information Service is no longer operating, and its database has been updated and is now part of ::.

The original ILDIS web-site will remain available for some time, but will not be updated. The ildis,org domain name will disappear in September 2027 unless someone else takes it over, but the web-site may remain accessible at ildis.rwhite.uk for an extended period.

Please let me know of any problems (Richard White).

According to Peter Brewer's PhD project first year report (November 2001), ILDIS (Bisby et al. 2000, 2001) began in 1985 (Zarucchi et al., 1993) and was (at version 5 in 2001) “nearing completion”.

The 5th ILDIS Workshop was held at Reading (17-18 November 2005) immediately following the 7th UK Legume Workshop held at Kew (15 November 2005).

ILDIS was one of the first two or three Global Species Databases (GSDs) contributing to the Catalogue of Life.

The original ILDIS web-site will remain available for some time, and some pages will gradually be transferred to this wiki. Other pages will be identified as part of an archive, which will be preserved as a historical record, and will not be updated. I will endeavour to ensure that the main URLs do not change, so that you can continue to bookmark

• https://ildis.org
• https://ildis.org/LegumeWeb

Please let me know of any problems (Richard White).

“It makes sense that legumes, as one of the largest and most economically and ecologically important plant families, were the focus of some of the earliest pioneering work to develop online species databases and information systems from the 1980s onwards, notably through the International Legume Database & Information System (ILDIS). However, despite this early prominence of legumes in biodiversity informatics, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that a new and more modern database and species information system for legumes is required. In a paper produced under the umbrella of the Legume Phylogeny Working Group (Bruneau et al. 2019) ¹⁾ the history of legume databasing and ILDIS is reviewed, the value of taxon-centric information systems is discussed in relation to wider global biodiversity databasing initiatives, and exemplar species information systems for other taxonomic groups are surveyed. This survey provides the foundations and a road-map for a much-needed new online species information system for legumes. We very much encourage this new initiative to reinstate legumes at the forefront of species informatics; we endorse the on-going value of taxon-centric information systems and encourage the development of a system that can interface efficiently with key global taxonomic, specimen and trait databases; we look forward to a state-of-the-art new legume species information system.

“This proposed new legume information system will be useful for myriad sub-disciplines in science, with trait details of various sorts compiled into a searchable and expandable database, including information on economic uses and ethnobotany of legumes. …” – Colin Hughes, Ashley Egan, Daniel Murphy and Tadashi Kajita Advances in Legume Systematics 13, Australian Systematic Botany, 2019, 32, i–iii (https://doi.org/10.1071/SBv32n6_ED)

• ILDIS publications
• Notes on the history of ILDIS
• ILDIS annotated bibliography

Roskov Y.R., Bisby F.A., Zarucchi J.L., Schrire B.D. & White R.J. (eds.) ILDIS World Database of Legumes: draft checklist, version 10 [published June 2006, but CD shows November 2005 date]. ILDIS, Reading, UK, 2006 [CD-Rom: ISBN 0 7049 1248 1]
(also available here at https://ildis.org/LegumeWeb10.01.shtml)