Changelog

Notable changes to the Flora Codex API and the developer console, newest first, from the first public release in 2021 to today. The list is curated, not exhaustive, and generally only highlights the changes a developer would notice.

2026

June 14

• Data Additional cultivation data indexed. Growing depth, climate range, and propagation notes from USDA PLANTS, FAO's ECOCROP, and the wider botanical record now overlay the taxonomy, so a lookup can speak to how a species is grown, not only how it is named.
• Docs New developer guides. Authentication, rate limits, error handling, and migrating from v1, each walking through the headers and response shapes you will actually see, with worked examples.

June 10

• Platform Increased free-tier limits: 5,000 requests a month and 60 a minute, up 20x. Every response now reports your remaining quota in the headers.
• Auth OAuth 2.0 authentication, alongside API keys. Applications obtain access tokens from a standard token endpoint, and a discovery document advertises the supported endpoints, so common OAuth client libraries connect without custom wiring.

June 8

• API A standard error format across v2 and v3, following RFC 9457 Problem Details. A failure returns a typed problem with a stable code, and a validation error lists each field that was rejected and why.
• Deprecation The v1 surface is now formally deprecated, with a sunset of 31 January 2027. Responses carry Deprecation and Sunset headers, so clients can see the timeline without reading the docs. v1 keeps working until then.

June 7

• Data Species photographs refreshed. The new import keeps only images free of restrictive licensing, so the photo on a record is clear to use.

June 6

• Search Relevance-ranked search. An exact name match comes first, common-name and keyword matches follow, and English stemming means a search for grasses also finds grass.
• Fix Image-copyright dates now render in UTC, fixing an off-by-one that shifted them a day in some negative time zones.

June 5

• Fix Cultivation root depth now reports correct centimeters; a unit conversion was off by a factor of ten.
• Fix v1 parity corrections: a record's sources and bibliography are restored, and zero-value numeric fields are omitted rather than sent as 0.

May 13

• Fix v1 pagination links no longer echo your auth query parameter, so a key or token cannot leak through a next or prev URL.

May 9

• Platform A public status page at status.floracodex.com, backed by live monitoring. It shows current availability and recent uptime, so you can check the platform's health before debugging your own code.

April 23

• Data A new taxonomic backbone. Accepted names and their synonyms now come from the Catalogue of Life, supplemented by the World Checklist of Vascular Plants, giving names a single current source.

March 11

• API A rebuilt API in its permanent home, with published OpenAPI documentation and URI-based versioning, ready for the platform work that follows.

2025

September 4

• Platform Groundwork for the 2026 rebuild. The codebase and services were consolidated onto a newer foundation.

2022

December 31

• Auth New accounts must verify their email address before reaching authenticated routes, and the platform sends activation and password-reset messages, rate-limited to prevent abuse.

December 15

• Platform A redesign of the developer console: new sign-in, sign-up, and email-verification flows, API reference documentation styled to match the site, and a refreshed wordmark.

December 10

• Platform Usage metering and quota enforcement: every request counts against its API key, and access stops at the plan's budget for the period.

August 27

• Auth API keys are hardened. A key is stored only as a one-way hash and cannot be read back after it is issued, so the value shown once is the value you keep. A leaked database reveals no usable credentials.

August 14

• Auth API keys, rate limiting, and database-driven permissions. Access is scoped to a key rather than a session, rate limits keep the service stable under load, and a subject-based permission model controls what each caller can read and modify.

August 7

• Data Structured records beyond taxonomy. References, occurrences, and trait measurements each gain a typed model and permissioned endpoints, the groundwork for evidence-backed botanical data.

April 10

• Auth Member accounts. Identity, roles, and management endpoints added.

2021

June 8

• Data Growth and tolerance attributes from the USDA PLANTS database added.

May 23

• Data Sources in the response. A record can now point to the publications behind it, so the data carries its provenance.

May 22

• API The first standalone Flora Codex API. It serves plant taxonomy and name search over REST, with responses shaped to match the Trefle v1 API, so applications written for Trefle can point at Flora Codex with little or no code change. Flora Codex begins here as a service in its own right.