pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Bear Kaufmann wrote:

> > 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

Wonderful. Excactly the framework we would need.
All we need nows the data!

> 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...

Rich