Permaculture Database

[Paul d'Aoust <paul@heliosville.com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-04 at 21:41 -0700, Paul Cereghino wrote:
> water relations - (inundation tolerance, drought tolerance, yield impact)
> 
> saturation tolerance (intolerant of saturation, tolerates dormant 
> saturation, tolerates short growing season saturation, tolerates 
> permanent saturation) (might include a note on adaptation type -- 
> aerenchyma etc..)
> drought tolerance (intolerant of drought, tolerates some drought, 
> tolerates severe drought)
> yield impact (yield minimally affected by drought, yield strongly 
> affected by drought, yield prevented by drought).

hm, that's a good idea. And I'm assuming that yield impact would be
applicable to both drought and saturation tolerance? And do we want to
define a plant's preference as well, or should that be gathered by
looking at its tolerances?

> If these attributes become an endless set of duplicative and overlapping 
> classes THEN we are in real trouble.

No doubt. I guess that goes back to the 'precision' thing you were
talking about.

You know, the needs for this sort of database could be adequately met
without the use of a hierarchy. We'd need some way to keep the
attributes/tags sane, of course (otherwise we'll be getting objects that
need phosphorus-rich soil and output meat and are really good at
pollinating, and other such nonsensical arrangements)... perhaps
something like Linux-style package management, where a certain package
(or attribute) either depends on, recommends, conflicts with, or does
not recommend another. For instance, the 'nitrogen fixing' tag cannot be
applied to an object unless the 'plant' tag is already applied.

Paul d'Aoust