Permaculture Information Web

[Paula Westmoreland <paula AT ecologicalgardens.com>]

Hi everyone -

I am excited this project is moving forward.  I have been watching the 
emails periodically and talking with Stephanie but haven't been 
participating because I'm not a technical person and have been pretty 
swamped with projects lately.

I (and several interns) have been working on a plant guild/community 
database for the Upper Midwest for the past two years.  I work in 
sustainable agriculture and landscaping so it has been a high priority 
for me to make it useable to those two communities.  The database is a 
relational design because I have experience with relational database and 
it is relatively inexpensive and accessible.  I know long-term this is 
not the optimal database repository.  Currently I have 1200 plants zoned 
3,4,5 and have gathered the information I thought was necessary to 
jumpstart the designing of candidate plant guilds for testing in 
different conditions and for different uses.  I wanted people to be able 
to run adhoc queries such as the following:

Give me all the nitrogen fixing plants that work in zone 3, sandy soil, 
partial shade, are rabbit-tolerant, and are native.
Give me all the native plant associates for plant x and their functions/uses
Give me all the native plant associates of hazelnut that are < 3' tall, 
harvestable in < 5 years, work in sandy soil, partial shade, and are 
wind-tolerant
Give me all the shrubs that provide food or habitat for pheasant
Give me all the plants that are good at erosion control, can tolerate 
wet clay soils, produce biomass and support beneficial insects
etc.

I have made some compromises along the way given the relational 
structure and the availability of certain types of information.  

I have included information on the following:
- plant charactertistics (height, spread, zones, native, flowering time, 
drought/flood/salt tolerances, soil types, ph, growth rate, lifespan, 
compaction/deer/rabbit/gopher/mice tolerances, bloom time, flower color, 
root type and depth, fruit type, etc)
- plant ecological functions (I've been working with 14 different 
functions from nitrogen-fixing, nitrogen-scavening, wildlife food, 
wildlife habitat, soil building, restoration/reclamation, etc).  Data 
has been pulled from online databases, books, research reports, etc.  I 
have included free-form notes and sources of information so people could 
decide if they wanted to ignore the data or not.
- plant human uses (I've been working with 10 different uses.  The uses 
are targetted for their economic potential and include years to harvest 
since that is important for sustainable agriculture farmers.  Some 
examples are animal forage, food, medicine, essential oils, cut flowers, 
wood, biomass)
- plant compatibilites/incompatibilities (included notes on sources. 
much of this is anecdotal)
- plant concerns (invasive, animal toxin, allergen, etc)
- native plant communities (this is really important because it provides 
the backbone for investigating plant associations, substitutions, etc)
- plant guilds, guild members, functions/uses - some are "candidates" 
waiting to be tested, some are "in testing" and some are "validated" for 
different functions and uses
- plant guild management
- site trials (what is being tested where, under what conditions, with 
what results)

An area of particular interest to me is soil and plant associates e.g. 
what plant communities are needed to support different mycorrhizal 
associates?  The research in this area is just beginning so there is not 
alot of data available at the present time.

I would like to be part of the process and hopefully the data we are 
collecting, the guilds etc we are testing will fit into the structure 
you are building.  I currently have a SARE grant and am working with 
sustainable agriculture/permaculture farmers to use the application and 
design plant guilds/communities for their properties, give feedback on 
additional data needs etc.  I expect I will need to add more cropping 
and economic data down the road.  The plan is to make this available on 
the internet in the next year, probably using VB.net and mysql.

Hope this adds to the conversation -
Paula