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  • From: Stephanie Gerson <sgerson@stanfordalumni.org>
  • To: Plants For A Future <webmaster@pfaf.org>, <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] How do we want to define locales?
  • Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:05:25 -0700

I’ve really been enjoying this discussion about locales. A few points to
make:

à I agree with Johns that this is a wonderful opportunity “to re-seed a
bioregionally based understanding of place.” Imagine enhancing people’s
relationships with where they live through this added bioregional, and
ultimately, ecological, understanding of place… I think this is valuable
enough to include in grant proposals!

à In debating how to define locales, we must consider function. As Scott
asked, what is the locale information for? What is the intention? How will
it help hg assist folks with guild design? Or, how can information about
locales be used *in conjunction* with information about relationships between
plants? How can information about locale become part of the informational
content of the db?

à Chad hoped that “we could find/make a utility to translate ZIP/Postal
code to Lat/Long or some such... maybe even locales themselves” and Lawrence
responded with numerous resources to that effect. And it would be perty
incredible if hg, using both the resources Lawrence mentioned and information
contributed by users, could create a Permaculture-centric map of the world!
Imagine clicking on an area of the map or entering a zip code, and learning
about soil texture, rain patterns, and other such features. Obviously,
creating a specific enough map for it to be useful to individuals would take a
long time…but it could be a continuous process, occurring behind-the-scenes
as information is embedded in hg. Users would collectively be creating a
super information-rich interactive map of the world (granted, only certain
portions of it) by embedding information about their specific bioregions. And
for places where many people are practicing sustainable agriculture and
contributing data, there would be a ‘high resolution’ of information (you
could ‘zoom’ in more to discover more specific details), whereas for
places with less people practicing and contributing data, there would be a
‘low resolution’ of information – but this in itself would be
meaningful, demonstrating where in the world people practicing sustainable
agriculture and contributing to hg. Am I making sense? If not, tell me,
because I want to be able to express these ideas.

I think Lawrence was thinking along these lines, suggesting that hg “Have an
area in the DB where various terms are defined through user input, i.e.
bioregion as opposed to inferring what it means from data added to a bioregion
field in a plant record.

And this could be done by pursuing Johns’s “serious proposal”:

”Include fields for zone, bioregion, ecotone and biome and let these areas
fill with input as the project evolves; For such concepts as bioregion which
promote a deeper understanding of nature and nature's forces and represent a
realm of knowledge about plants, though maybe esoteric, te DB should contain
significant resources to help understand this concept and broaden knowledge of
it by providing as much data as possible about it.”

And I agree with Lee that “bioregional standards could be very useful and
presently don't really exist; maybe part of this project could be to define
some bioregional criteria/geographic boundaries which would continue to
develop over time with user input. If we really did it right maybe they could
eventually become widely used standards.”

Also, Bear wrote, “A collaborative effort to create GIS based bioregional
maps would be quite cool.” Sounds intriguing. Could you please explain
this? And would this be possible without folks having to purchase GIS
equipment (or even know about it) in order to participate?

à A question: do USDA zones apply worldwide? Because we would have to use
only aspects that do apply worldwide, such as lat/lon and zips.

à Rich asked, “So where do we get this bio-region info from? Do you have a
good list of appropriate bio-regions which we could use.” Does this info
exist, or would hg create it with user info (as I described above)? Or some
of both?

à But I agree with Rich “to set the initial goals very low try to just
concentrate on the core architecture.” But as I mentioned above, why not
have hg do the work? Build the core architecture so that it could receive
information about bioregions, and be continuously building an informational
map. Is this possible?

But as Rich asked, and this is critical, “What are the initial goals?”

We must answer this question yalls! What do people think of the Phase 1 goals
proposed by Johns that I sent out in the last synthesis? Perhaps I’ll start
a thread dedicated to Phase 1.

peace
*Stephanie

p.s. Welcome, Lee!

p.p.s. As you will likely be able to tell, yes I confess, I am still using
W-w-w-w...W-w-w-o....W-w-w-w-o-o...W-w-w-o-o-r....can't even bring myself to
say it. But I will change soon!

p.p.p.s. I am super embarrassed about the girlfriendless window email I
mistakenly sent to the entire Permaculture list…and I’m supposed to be our
PR person?? oops.



------ Original Message ------
Received: 05:04 AM PDT, 09/12/2004
From: Plants For A Future <webmaster@pfaf.org>
To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] How do we want to define locales?

On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Chad Knepp wrote:

> Interesting responses happening... a couple of comments.
>
> The USDA Zone 1-10 is basically only an indicator of minimum winter
> temperature which falls into my climate category. Personally, I think
> Lat/Long + extesive climate info (max/min temperatures quarterly,
> rainfall quarterly or monthly, humidity?, others?) would be the
> simplest... what about topography? Hopefully we could find/make a
> utility to translate ZIP/Postal code to Lat/Long or some such... maybe
> even locales themselves. Although I really think bioregions are what
> we are talking about here, like Scott says, I'm not sure there exists
> a clear enough distinction of which bioregion is which... perhaps our
> definition of locale will demarcate bioregions better.
>
> Anyway, keep talking about this cause it still isn't clear to me.
>
>
All very good stuff here, certainly it would be great for all this to
go in.

I think we might need to distinguish locale which defines a position /
area separate from habitat, conditions etc. Yes a locale might
map to a particular set of conditions, habitats and bioregions
but these are properties of the locale rather than its identifier.

Maybe easiest to explain in code we might have

class Locale:
int lat
int long
String country-code

Habitats matchingHabitats
Bioregions matchingBioregions
Conditions matichingConditions

class Habitats: pass
...

supose we really need to keep each individual class as small
rather than going for very large unwhieldy classes which could be hard
to modify later.

Catch my drift?

Rich



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+++++++++++++++
Stephanie Gerson
sgerson@stanfordalumni.org
(c) 415.871.5683


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