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  • From: Paula Westmoreland <paula AT ecologicalgardens.com>
  • To: piw AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [piw] Plant Guild database specs
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 10:03:48 -0600

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




  • [piw] Plant Guild database specs, Paula Westmoreland, 02/11/2005

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