| Abstract Detail
Conservation Biology Tankersley, Boyce [1], Henderson, Min [1], Vieglais, Dave [2], Riccardi, Greg [3], Dunn, Christopher [4], Allenstein, Pam [5], Stark, Dan [6]. PlantCollections – Accessing the knowledge warehouses of botanic gardens and arboreta. PlantCollections – A Community Solution provides access over the WWW to plant records data held in botanic gardens and arboreta. Eighteen botanic gardens & arboreta participating in the project provide access to records of over 50,000 taxa.
Scientists from eight disciplines and plant recorders from the botanic gardens were surveyed to determine the 161 fields in the federated schema. These records include naturally occurring and cultivar plant nomenclature. Other data fields contain environmental and biological data from collection sites and plant growth, aesthetics, propagation, mortality and weather data collected in gardens.
This project is the first instance of the use of Google Base as a central WWW repository for biodiversity data. It has quick responses, caches large volumes of data, is free, and extensively mirrored.
The Portal for accessing the data integrates Web2O advances and can access other data providers using RSS or ATOM. Living plant collections, herbaria, DNA, image & seed storage databases all contribute data. A partnership with Morphbank has provided storage of digital images while Google Map/Earth can be used to create distribution maps.
Among the benefits to botanists and taxonomists are the creation of an application that bridges technology, nationality, language, professional affiliations & cost concerns. It supports the study of plant names, plant origins, characteristics of cultivated plants and provides a mechanism to contrast cultivated environments with those of natural populations. It automatically searches the synonym name fields in an effort to return desired records regardless of the taxonomic and nomenclatural difference amongst botanic gardens and arboreta. Data users may search records from one or more institutions to create reports, maps and access images.
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1 - Chicago Botanic Garden, Living Plant Documentation, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL, 60022, USA
2 - University of Kansas, Biodiversity Research Center and Natural History Museum, #111 2040 W 31st Street, Lawrence, KS, 66046, USA
3 - Florida State University, College of Information, Tallahassee, Florida, 32306, USA
4 - University of Hawaii, Lyon Arboretum, 3860 Manoa Road, Honolulu, HI, 96822
5 - American Public Gardens Association, North American Plant Collections Consortium, 100 West 10th Street Suite 614, Wilmington, DE, 19801, USA
6 - American Public Gardens Association, Administration, 100 West 10th Street Suite 614, Wilmington, DE, 19801, USA
Keywords:
PlantCollections
Plant conservation
bioinformatics
Botanic gardens
Google Base
Morphbank
Distribution maps
images.
Presentation Type: Poster:Posters for Topics
Session: P
Location: Ball Room & Party Room/SUB
Date: Monday, July 28th, 2008
Time: 12:30 PM
Number: PCB001
Abstract ID:15 |
