POWO (Kew Plants)

liveScienceBiology

POWO (Plants of the World Online, by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).

2tools
0msauth
free tier50 calls/day

Tools

powo_search_plants

Search the Kew World Checklist of Vascular Plants (the taxonomy behind Plants of the World Online) for accepted plant names and synonyms by scientific name. Returns matching taxa with their family, ra

No parameters required.

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powo_get_taxon

Fetch a Kew World Checklist of Vascular Plants taxon record by fqId ("wcvp:<id>" from search_plants, or an IPNI-style urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:304293-2). Returns the taxon's classification, family/genu

No parameters required.

▶Try it

Test with curl

The gateway speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP POST. You can test any pack directly from the terminal.

List available tools
bash
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/powo/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'
Call a tool
bash
curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/powo/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"powo_search_plants","arguments":{}}}'

Use with the SDK

Install @pipeworx/sdk to call tools from any TypeScript/Node project.

TypeScript
import { Pipeworx } from '@pipeworx/sdk';
const px = new Pipeworx();
const result = await px.call("powo_search_plants", {});
ask_pipeworx
// Or ask in plain English:
const answer = await px.ask("powo (plants of the world online, by the royal botanic gardens, kew)");