pcplantdb

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

> Did you guys ever check this out?:
> http://www.laspilitas.com/comhabit/zipcode.htm
Yeah, and was basing a bit of my commentary on it, though the 
references might not have been obvious.
It's a helpful system....what Sean is suggesting (in the last post, 
some below) is something with even more fine grained potential...

Sean writes:
> Even better is if we can get GPS savvy users.  The GPS not
> only gives better accuracy to lat/long than postal
> codes, but also includes altitude.  Throw in some
> weather gadgets and an accurate micro-climate picture
> can be developed over time for any given locality.  On
> the exreme end of sensor automation, we get pretty far
> out of scope for PIW, which I'm still not sure where
> the real scope ends anyway.
Something I mentioned before is that a lot of satellite based 
weather/climate/etc data is now available (and darned if I can't find 
the URL's right now... :-P ). It should be possible to grab a lot of 
info for a specific point if we can access and process that data (I'm 
wondering if there already isn't something on the web that can do that).

Sean writes:
> However, the formula calculating distance is fairly simple.
Yes, but it would be interesting, and a bit more of a challenge to 
calculate "climate similarity/ecological relatedness". Though that is 
quite fine grained....I think getting access to polygons (shape files, 
from WWF?) and finding which ecosystem type a point is in, is most 
accurate...though preprocessing it into a DB table of postal codes 
(noting multi-ecosystem overlap within a postal area) is acceptable, 
and what the LasPilitas site does..

Richard Morris writes:
>         find which regions are inside which other region
>         find overlapping regions
>         find which regions contain a particular spot cordinate
I believe these functions are now a part of newer MySQL releases:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/gis-introduction.html

I'd also like to note that there is an open source map server:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/
This would be great to incorporate...if there was access to data such 
as native plant ranges etc in standardized shape files, or ecosystem 
ranges, that would be great to show...

Also, regarding the guild relationship thread...
I'd also be wary of setting up something that might give the sense of a 
rigid set of guilds and plants that are within them...we should try to 
aim to make the information show people what relationships are 
available, and how different plants(+) could add to a guild...
But, I think if we can find available data on species endemic to a 
specific natural ecosystem, this would be a good tool to have. One 
guild design strategy being to find analogs to the natural plant 
communities around you...

OK, 'nough change from my pocket fer now,
Bear