About this tool

Background

Fruits and seeds form the bulk of agricultural commerce. However, they can also be common contaminants of some commodities. To safeguard agriculture and natural resources and facilitate a healthy seed trade, unknown fruits and seeds must be correctly identified. Accurate and efficient identification is a critical step in safeguarding against seed-borne diseases, assessing product quality and certification, verifying that a product meets a country’s phytosanitary requirements, and halting the introduction, establishment, and spread of economically and environmentally detrimental plant species.

Fruit and Seed Family ID is adapted from the Family Guide for Fruits and Seeds (Kirkbride et al. 2006) to provide a more user-friendly, accessible, and up-to-date resource to support fruit and seed identification using minimal magnification. The taxonomy used in Family Guide for Fruits and Seeds is out of date, and many of the features and states used in the key and to produce the descriptions are difficult to interpret, especially for non-expert users. For the 123 families updated in the Fruit and Seed Family ID as much of the data from Family Guide for Fruits and Seeds as possible is incorporated, while adhering to the taxonomic changes that have occurred over the last two decades. In addition, less specialized language is used to improve accessibility and high-quality images are added to capture the morphological diversity of fruit and seed characteristics within each family. Future editions will review and update the remaining families.

For more about the Family Guide for Fruits and Seeds, click on the link to Version history under the "ABOUT" section.

Scope

Fruit and Seed Family ID is designed to support identification of any fruits and seeds. This tool is intended for individuals working at ports of entry, state departments of agriculture, university extension services, and for anyone interested in fruit and seed identification. This is a multi-year project; the first edition of the tool covered 79 monocotyledon families (based on the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (2016)). The next edition, to be published in September 2024, will include all of the remaining seed plant families. The taxonomy and fact sheets are updated for 123 families representing 97% of all disseminuledisseminule:
detachable plant part capable of being disseminated and of propagating, commonly a seed or fruit
interceptions. The remaining families are directly from Family Guide for Fruits and Seeds without modification. Future editions will update the remaining 280 families. Nomenclature in the tool for the updated angiosperm families follows GRIN-Global, which generally follows the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group’s classification (2016). For the families not updated, nomenclature follows GRIN as of December 2003, which broadly followed Cronquist (1981)Cronquist (1981):
Cronquist A. 1981. An integrated system of classification of flowering plants. Columbia University Press, New York. 1261 pp..