Drought, Waterlogging and Shade tolerance, and access to the BRC Database of Insect and their Food Plants

New data 
New data from Niinemets and Valadares, 2006, on drought, waterlogging and shade tolerance  for some 500 woody shrubs and trees has been added. These indices  come with a new help page ( from the help menu) and at the moment are not searchable but appear as new characteristics in the ecological characteristics list for each species.

Searchable Characteristics
It has not gone unnoticed that several new characteristics have been added to the characteristics list over past couple of  years,  but we have not programmed the interface to include relevant search facilities.  This will be remedied over this winter  as we hope to revamp the user interface in general. Until then the data will appear under the lists of characteristics for particular species.

BRC Database of Insect and their Food Plants
We now have direct access to this database from the menu for each species if the BRC hold data, which they do  for over 1600 plants in our database. This means that as well as the NHM corrected data that we hold (increasingly historic data)  a maintained list of  insects that use each species is  now available directly from the site.

Summer News

Data Corrections

 Over the spring and summer two major tasks have been undertaken by  Clive Massey:  the diacriticals   have been  corrected in the database, and the species names have been returned to an initial capital letter. Both tasks are much simpler in their description than their completion.

During the course of this work we found satisfyingly few data errors of the type that we can identify  ( e.g. misplaced elements etc. ), as opposed to  incorrect entries of data which can only be identified by checking.

Photographs.

We now have over 500 species with photographs, and many of these have had their  photographs improved. Anyone who has photographs that they would like to put on the database, please contact me.

New Species.

8 species have had their data added to the database, and 13 have had additional data entered.  Autumn should see a return to the data additions and updates. 

Future Developments.

 Later on this year we will undertake a major redevelopment of the user interface, allowing more efficient mining of the   database, and access to other databases of a similar nature from species searches.  Again if there are specific features that anyone would like to see incorporated, do let us know.