[1] The NSF compared cyberinfrastructure to physical infrastructure, "... the distributed computer, information and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor".

[5] With the advent of bioinformatics, computational biology, DNA sequencing, geographic information systems and others computers can greatly assist researchers who study plant life looking for solutions to challenges in medicine, biofuels, biodiversity, agriculture and problems like drought tolerance, plant breeding, and sustainable farming.

[6] Many of these problems cross traditional disciplines and facilitating collaboration between plant scientists of diverse backgrounds and specialties is necessary.

[9] A proposal was accepted (adopting the convention of using the word "Collaborative" as a noun) and iPlant was officially created on February 1, 2008.

[10] Gregory Andrews, Vicki Chandler, Sudha Ram and Lincoln Stein served as Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs) from 2008 to 2009.

[15][16] iPlant is "designed to create the foundation to support the computational needs of the research community and facilitate progress toward solutions of major problems in plant biology.

[23][24] Several more recent National Science Foundation awards mentioned iPlant explicitly in their descriptions, as either a design pattern to follow or a collaborator with whom the recipient will work.

[6] The Discovery Environment integrates community-recommended software tools into a system that can handle terabytes of data using high-performance supercomputers to perform these tasks much more quickly.

[6][32] A set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers allow access to iPlant services, including authentication, data management, high performance supercomputing resources from custom, locally produced software.

This is needed because plant names that are misspelled, out of date (because a newer synonym is preferred), or incomplete make it hard to use computers to process large lists.