Progress
In March and early April, Discover Life put large new disks on its servers and
implemented a new tool for contributors to manage and upload large numbers of images, associated text, and metadata.
EcoLibrary, http://www.discoverlife.org/ed/ecolibrary, uses this tool
and showcases how we intend to serve images and associated text for Plants for the People.
Between mid-April and June, we will assemble and start serving the first 200,000 images contributed to Plants for the People.
Bob Magill has contributed a species list from Missouri Botanical Garden's Tropicos database.
We have processed this list into a series of nested checklists:
and corresponding guides:
which although they have a set of initial character-states that we will refine, have only been scored
for "Division" and "Family."
While these links provide a rapid start to our project,
this data upon which they are based were extracted from Tropicos several years ago and need considerable work to clean it up.
Specifically, we must
- split out certain families and genera, such as the 3,797 members of the Asteraceae, for example,
so that the checklists and guides are smaller and faster to manipulate,
- pending a conversation between Bob Magill and Barbara Thiers,
add Bryophyta species, aiming within year-1 to illustrate bryophytes to genera but not to species,
- update the families in which we have placed genera to reflect the most current phylogeny,
assigning the fern genera to families in the process,
- reconcile the species names with The Flora of North America,
other databases, and with taxonomic experts for each family and genus.
In parallel to cleaning up the taxonomy, we propose to integrate over 200,000 images by mid-June.
These images will include photographs, illustrations, and scanned herbarium specimens that are in digital
databases at the Field Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden,
North Carolina Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Discover Life.
Images
We plan to integrate image databases into Plants for the People. To search these via thumbnails, please see