Guidelines for proposals to conserve or reject names.

Accurate scientific names of plants are essential for communication about them and are especially important for international exchange of agricultural, horticultural and forest plants. In order to ensure that the scientific names of plants remain stable, a set of rules has been developed about how scientific names should be applied. This set of rules allows names that are well known to stay the same or be conserved, even though they should be changed according to the rules. In order to conserve a scientific name, one must write and publish a proposal to do this according to the guidelines in this article. These guidelines will be used by botanists worldwide to determine the accurate scientific names of plants.