Technical Abstract: Identification of botanical materials, especially botanical dietary supplements, has become a major concern in light of the tremendous growth of the market. Adulteration, intentional and accidental, is common. The FDA has recently issued current good manufacturing procedures (cGMPs) that require identification of all botanical ingredients in a product. This has created an even greater demand for validated analytical methods for botanical identification. AOAC INTERNATIIONAL is the U.S. scientific body responsible for validation of analytical methods. They assembled an expert review panel to draft guidelines to be used for validating botanical identification methods. These guidelines establish basic concepts regarding botanical identification. The method can be regarded as a black box that returns a binary result: 1=yes this is the material, or 0=no this is not the material. It must discriminate between specified target and non-target materials, it must discriminate between materials with acceptable and unacceptable purity, and it must be characterized with respect to the probability-of-identification (POI) curve that shows the concentration-dependent transition from 1 (yes) to 0 (no).