Permaculture Database

[Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>]

Does this adequately summarize this idea?:

Plant or guild records can be associated with an XY coordinate which is 
compared  to raster climate data to provide numerical 'location' 
attributes describing environmental conditions that can be aggregated 
between multiple records.

If we can summarize our key concepts I would be better able to collect them.

Paul Cereghino

Bear Kaufmann wrote:

> 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
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