Permaculture Database

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Instead of (or in addition to) tag based values it might be  
appropriate to consider numeric values. The PFAF database already  
contains these (height, etc) so they would need to be handled in some  
form anyway.

Some environmental values/requirements couldn't easily be determined  
by a novice (or expert).

From this comes the idea of using a model like BIOCLIM. The basic  
process is:
1. Organism existence is identified at a lat/long location (from  
herbarium records, or in our case, user reports).
2. Climatic attributes (soil, etc in some models cases) are  
determined for each location from GIS surfaces (I believe MapServer  
can be used to query raster/vector surfaces in a web server  
environment).
3. Rules are created to describe the range of the organism based on  
attributes (there are various methods: statistical, envelope, genetic  
algorithm, etc).
4. Usually, a map is created by applying the discovered rules back  
onto the GIS surfaces to determine the range.

We can skip step 4, and take a single point (user location, site  
location, guild location, etc), and determine the likelihood that an  
organism will grow well in that location. This of course skips a  
number of interactions/relationships/microclimatic factors  
permaculturalists would be interested in.

I believe this could produce an index (not just present/not present)  
to provide a ranking of potential plants. Plants scoring lower on the  
index might still grow given the correct placement against a wall,  
soil amendments, etc. The quality of the results is dependent on the  
number of lat/long records, so noting the +/- potential error is  
important.

Cheers,
Bear