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  • From: Heide Hermary <heide.hermary AT gaiacollege.ca>
  • To: Permaculture Information Web <piw AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [piw] Q2: what criteria do we want to record for plants.
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 07:49:08 -0800



Richard Morris wrote:


Yep, I can't get too excited by author either. It does have some minor use in that there are cases where the same name is given to two different plants. However, the Authors of the two are different so Botanical Name + Author can uniquely identify a plant.

Author info is farily easy to get from the internet, so I see not harm in including it. Whether we actually want to display it is another matter.

Fine, if somebody want to enter that info. We are currently going through a period of very rapid reclassification of plants - MANY plant names are changing, so the author info will become meaningless anyway very quickly.

Brief description of plant
1 paragraph summary of plant



Personally I don't see how one can summarize something in a paragraph that takes several pages to properly describe. Have never been a fan of executive summaries - don't see the point. In fact it's always someone else's point, these summaries acan only be written with a specific agenda in mind / subjective perspective. I'd rather spend more energy on proper description.



The idea of this is no such much in the actual page about a plant, but more for use in the results of searches, where 50 or so plants might be listed. To make the selection of plants from this list easier a short description could be useful. We could keep this very simple, for example

Tree with edible fruit and medicinal properties.

That's exactly what I'm concerned about: let's not pre-suppose that "tree with edible fruit and medicinal properties" is meaningful to everybody. In fact, it's totally meaningless to me in the Pacific Northwest to get results for trees that grow in Florida.

Could posibly have a page for each family, and there indicate the higher orders. Some higher info can be useful, for example the monocot/dicot distinction. A broad category like

Litchen/Moss/Fern/Gymnosperms (Confiers and related)/Moncot/Dicot

could be handy. There are some patterns I've found intersting in this stuff have a look at
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_fam.html

Its also has some use for plant ID. For the most part easy to get this information from the internet.

Okay, fine, although there are many different classification systems out there, and there isn't even agreement amongst the taxonomists. I mean, just look at how the "kingdoms" are changing. If someone wants to use these terms in the plant description I have no objection. I don't think it's our goal to classify plants according to those terms, but along acoecological / ecosystem / guild lines.

WHta I'm trying to get at hear is more the effect that introducing a plant might have on your ecosystem. So its not just this plant is "suceptable to this disease", but more this plant is sometime "a carrier for this disease" so planting a hawthorn might adversly affect your apple crop.

This could be a relationship
(Plant, is a carrier of,Disease)
or
(Plant, is a vector for, this type of insect)

Maybe the term "host" to an "organism" will solve this? Most organisms are very specific in the relationships they form with other organisms. And then we can describe the relationship, which can be complex. Still thinking how this might be best "labelled". I know we can't get around labels....

Indeed, habitats is a complex subject. Could have separate page describing a particular habitat in more detail, and the plants growing in that habitat.

Also a need for plain text description of the habitats.

I've done some work going through the text description of habitat in the pfaf db and come up with about 100 different habitats
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_canned.html#HABIT
many more I'm sure.

Related to this are Biomes which are "important ecological
communities or networks of communities that extend over large
areas." These include
Ice, tundra permafrost, tundra interfrost,
boreal semi-arid, boreal humid, temperate semi-arid,
temperate humid, Mediterranean warm, medeterranean cold,
desert tropical, desert temperate, desert cold,
tropical semi-arid, tropical humid.
It would be fun to link plants to the Biomes they occur
in naturally.

There is a very strong correlation between habitat / becosystem / biome etc. and "guild". This is super important information and needs to incorporated in a way that allows for great detail.

Sort of related to this is the idea of permacuture zones.
Could have sugestions as to which zones these plants are suitable for.

Goes beyond that to soils etc., but yes definitely related.



Plant Characteristics - physical stuff about the plant

Habit - tree, shrub, annual ,bienial etc.


yesd


Max Height - may want to include a locale
- might actually be a range


Range makes more sense, is very locale dependent


Indeed. Also habitat related.

Could have something like
Height: 15m - UK, woodland
3m - UK, Hedges
30m - US Rocky mountains

Not just UK = different moisture rconditions / soil conditions / elevations/ exposure to wind......

Temprature
Hardyness - which UDSA zones the plant grows in.

Frost tender - whether the plant can withstand frost

Number of days of frost plant can withstand

Min temprature plant can withstand

Max temprature



That depends, of course, on what time of year the frost occurs (has plant already hardened off / come out of hibernation?)


Yes. Still don't know best way to record this sort of stuff which goes a little further than the UDSA zones.

We are talking about a world-wide database, so USDA zones don't necessarily apply. In Canada we have totally different zones - dunno whether I can understand them. Plus the zones constantly change. I think it would be usefulfor a lot of people to have that info, but much more important is the descriptive info.

Medicinal Uses
Keywords
Rating
text description



Ethnobotany, hazards etc. Same sort of range of information. Have no idea what you mean by ratings.

Ratings are an idea to get users votes on a plant. Could have a sort of rating system from 1-5 to quickly indicate what people think about a plant. For example plants with a 5 rating for edibility are the niceest and plants with a 1 rating are edible but not very nice.

That's cool

Ah theres the rub. On to Q3.

A few things have emerged.

As well as plants there are a few other top level thing we might include
each of these might have a separate page

plants (species)
plants (cultivars)
families
other higher order groupings
locales - where
habitats
guilds and other groupings
plant uses
other creatures, pests, diseases

also a general relationship structure, a triple
(Subject,relationship,object)

Some items like height also need some sort of clarification
textual description, specilisations locales etc.

Tee dum

Rich

I think the this is superficial stuff . What we need to figure out is how to
- enter information about very complex relationships
- meaningfully search for info that may have been entered in a nonchalant / floweringly descriptive way.

The point is we cCANNOT, at this time, categorize the information we are trying to develop.

Hope that makes sense.
Cheers, Heide






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