Photographs, Species accounts and Interface.

Photos

32 species have had their photographs added or contributed to. We continually ask for photographs, particularly from critical groups.

Species accounts
 21 species have had their descriptions and data added to the database.

User Interface

We are still working on the user interface and a final search page allowing users to type in the item for which they wish information should be ready soon.

Data Updates and Interface Revamp

New Species and Updates. 

14 species have had descriptions and ecological characteristics added and 10 have had the descriptions and characteristics updates.

User Interface

There will be few updates for the next couple of months as we will be concentrating on improving the user interface.  We hope to incorporate user suggestions, and you have a little while to contact us with any suggestions.  We will be concentrating on making the whole database searchable, improving the output so that all the information is retrieved, and making bringing the interface into the 21st century.

Happy New Year and Current Activities

Happy New year to all our users. Slightly belated but HF has just had an ankle replaced and is only now getting back to a semblance of regular activity. I avoided the use of the word normal.

In the mean time  some 25 plants have had their descriptions added and their data entered into the  characteristics table together with another 10 descriptions, and 2 updates. Three papers containing over 1500  data items  have been incorporated as well, and we have programmed links to more external databases from the species pages.

As HF improves we are looking towards the revamp of the interface, which will be a response to the metrics collected on the database, as well as individual comments from users, and needs identified by the team.  Then  we would like to incorporate new methods of data collection involving the ecological  community, and ultimately we hope to plan a secure future for the database once the current team retire. 

Data Updates and Other Changes

The latest set of updates includes  4 species with characteristics added, approximately 80 species with new data on stomatal counts,  and approximately 1000  plants  with pollen diameters added. We have also been working on  the ordering of the specific  name for hybrids: we now place the hybrid name first, and  the parental names following.  We plan to combine these with a hybrid table from the original database  which will link directly to the parental names and characteristics.

We will be planning an updated user interface over the winter, and if anyone has concrete proposals or suggestions, please email Henry Ford or manager@ecoflora.co.uk

Thanks to those who have already contributed.

Relative Growth rates and Biological Floras

Relative Growth Rates: 

Two new characteristics have been added for 129 plants, RGRmax, and RGR which will be made searchable  in the new year.


Biological Flora Accounts:

With the recent addition of access to CABI fact sheets and the Database of Insects and their food plants, it made  great sense to add links to the autecological accounts of species in the Biological Flora of the British Isles series published in the Journal of Ecology. The access to these varies, either from Wiley or from JSTOR, and  may depend on your personal permissions.  The extant accounts have been linked to the species pages and  you can now go to these directly.

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.

Funding and Team Members

Funding

Sad to say the BES  have decided not to fund us again, so for the third year running we will be without funds. Anyone with innovative ideas, drop us a line. Work will carry on on an entirely voluntary basis.

Team Members

I have been joined by Clive Massey, a database expert, ex  Bath University, and he has already been through the database behind the scenes and tidied up any number of  small problems, including accents on author names.  It is good to have someone  to bounce ideas off.

Progress.

Apart from the background database work, 15 species  have had photographs added, and 23 have had additional photographs. 27 species have had  descriptions added and ecological characteristics added. The Somerset Rare Plants Group have  contributed photos and I look foward to more of them being uploaded.

Plans.

We hope to add direct links to the  BRC  insect database and to the UK moth database. This should  decrease the potential workload for us in maintaining the insect database when there are experts beavering away maintaining these properly. Our data will remain online, but  further and more detailed data will be available from these  sources. We will enhanced our data with extracts from the TRY database system to which we are contributors. 

Our next target is to redesign the  main interface, allowing for easier search facilities

Data additions and corrections during January

We have been busy  during this month and have made a number of corrections to typographical errors in the data.  Our main work  has been the addition of 750  records spread across the data set, mainly to seed weight and seed numbers, but also to two new characteristics, mean plant dry mass and max stem diameter.  These are all accompanied as usual by their sources, of which we have added a further 50.

We should soon have a reasonably complete table of hybrids  and links to their distributions etc, but  little ecological data.  The next task will then be  the writing and uploading of the descriptions for the next 300 aliens, and the extraction of the data for these plants. This will  provide us with data on a total of over 1000 of our most common aliens.


Henry F

Happy New Year to our users

Ecoflora hopes everyone has had a great holiday season, that everyone has had a productive year last year,  and that the plans for your activities in 2015 are  getting under way.

Here, we are about to start a rationalisation of the database, prior to redesigning the interface. Now is the time to put in your requests from your wishlist.   We are planning the usual updates of species data, and hope to have more photographs ready for the production of a plant identification app. The addition of 26,000 records of floral morphology last year should enable us to complete this by spring this year.  We also intend to apply to TRY for further data on our species. The TRY data sets do not necessarily correspond to our ecological characteristics, but that is no reason not to include the data, even thought they may  not prove to be sensibly  searchable as the traits will differ from species to species.  

Our usage statistics are slightly down from last year, but since being a member of TRY - www.try-db.org, we have been receiving regular data requests via this site at a rate of about 20 per month. One has popped up as I type this note.

We also hope to receive funding for our work this year and will be putting in a few grant applications to this end.

So we hope that all our users have a splendid New Year.

Henry Ford

Ecoflora

September 2014

Ecological Characteristics Update

138 plants have had their ecological characteristics updated from the floras. The addition of the characteristics to the database for the 400  species for which we have gathered descriptions and data is planned for the winter.  Photographs are  being added with a new interface and we have completed the  conversion and added some 20 plants to the galleries since the last post. The major change has been behind the scenes, where I am now using Lightroom and the associated database it provides so that the future additions to the  galleries will be much easier to maintain. I hope to put in a survey at the end of the year  from surveymonkey (which I hope everyone will complete ) so that we can plan future changes to user needs.
Thanks,
Henry Ford

Floral Characteristics

The last 12 months have been dominated by the addition of floral characteristics to the characteristics table for all species in the Ecoflora.  They are not currently searchable, but appear as characteristics when you retrieve  the data for particular species. We will be altering the underlying software within a few weeks. Several people have requested this data,  so if you need a data set with the  floral characteristics included, please just ask.  In the course of this exercise, 400 alien species descriptions have been gathered, and these will be added and the data extracted for the characteristics table over the next 6 months.  

We are planning to move the Ecoflora photographs to a new system which should improve the look and manageability of the photos. Anyone wishing to contribute photos, please mail me.

Thanks

Henry Ford

Kew and BSBI HerbariumOnline Herbarium Sheets and Google Images

 We have now added automatic links to Kew Herbarium Sheets, where these have been added to the database, ( few at the moment, but they are continually being added ). These are generally not of British material. We have also added direct links to the BSBI Herbarium online programme site and you can access all the sheets that are included for each species.  We have  also added  links to Google Images. These latter of course are generally reliable but they are not  part of the database and therefore cannot be guaranteed. We have included Google image links  for fungi and insects, so botanists can familiarize themselves with the associates of their plants.  

News October 2013

The last 18 months:  Work has been handicapped by the lack of financial support.   The  Ecoflora has been updated and maintained with no funding.  However in spite of this,  considerable activity has been undertaken.  40 alien plants have had their ecological characteristics added to the database, and work continues with the addition of 7 characteristics to every plant. We are half way through this at the moment and  it should be completed by the end of the year.  Conference attendance in Europe has highlighted the lack of funding for infrastructure projects - several grant awarding bodies specifically excluding database construction from their remit.  This handicaps the resuscitation of  otherwise dead data, but work continues .

The next 12 months should see the continuation of updates, the addition of photographs, the addition of new ecologcal characteristic data to for some of the additional alien species and the updating of the taxonomic database to reflect the latest taxonomic revisions. Errors have been noted in the typography of the authorities, and we are correcting these as we come across them.

Missing Data : We now have a missing data facility, so everyone can now look and see what measurements we need to complete the database, so for those of us still working on plants, please check the missing data facility for the plants you are working on and take a few extra measurements for the database.

Usage: During the 9 months to Oct  2013 we have had just under 13,000 separate users of the website. So thanks to our hosts 34sp.com for providing such a seamless service. And on January 1 we had 34 separate users, 6 more than last year.  Again, none of them were me.

Associated Fungi, and Phytophagous Insects: Authorities have been added, together with synonymy and name status, from data generously supplied by the Natural History Museum. Errors remain ours however and some typographic errors remain and it is hoped that these will be cleared up in the coming months.

Updates of Ecological characteristics : 2 plants have had their ecological characteristics updated. We continue to add  new data to the alien species.

Photographs: Through links with the Bristol Environmental Records Centre, we hope to have a number of  photographs added to the  web site by the end of the year.

Links: Several new links have been added to our list or sites relevant to the UK flora.

Funding : No funding has been awarded for the last 18 months. We continue to search for further funding to keep the site active. Further funding always needs to be sourced. Contact Prof Alastair Fitter, or Henry Ford from the contacts page.

Requests : We are always looking for more data. If you have any, we would be very grateful if you could contribute. Useful photographs and drawings 

will be much appreciated.

Henry Ford, Jan 2012.

News, January 2012

The last 12 months has seen the complete revision of the underlying taxonomic database to include over 1800 alien species for which we now have data from the English Nature audit of alien species (M.O.Hill et al). Most of the taxonomic revisions from the last 3 years have now been incorporated into the database. Do report any errors or discrepancies to Henry Ford from the contacts. The NVC habitat codes for the flora have been updated, with subcommunity, constancy and abundance data. These data are now available for 1,066 plants. Photographs for some 100 plants have been added and we hope to have a further 500 plants photographed by the end of the year.

The next 12 months should see the continuation of updates, the addition of photographs, the addition of new ecologcal characteristic data to for some of the additional alien species and the updating of the taxonomic database to reflect the latest taxonomic revisions.

Missing Data : We now have a missing data facility, so everyone can now look and see what measurements we need to comlete the database, so for those of us still working on plants, please check the missing data facility for the plants you are working on and take a few extra measurements for the database.

Usage: During the 12 months to Jan 2012 we have had just under 17,000 separate users of the website. So thanks to our hosts 34sp.com for providing such a seamless service. And on January 1 we had 28 separate users.  None of them were me.

Associated Fungi, and Phytophagous Insects: Authorities have been added, together with synonymy and name status, from data generously supplied by the Natural History Museum. Errors remain ours however and some typographic errors remain and it is hoped that these will be cleared up in the coming months.

Updates of Ecological characteristics : 5 plants have had their ecological characteristics updated. Now that the plant descriptions for British native plants and the 200 most common aliens have been competed this work will continue.

Kew Germination Data: Seed germination data has been received from the Millennium Seed Bank, Kew, and now appears on the results page of an ecological characteristics search for a species, as it is not directly comparable to the characteristics table.

Links: Several new links have been added to our list or sites relevant to the UK flora.

Funding : The British Ecological Society have generously funded the Ecological Flora again for the coming year enabling us to undertake the major revisions that have been made. Further funding always needs to be sourced. Contact Prof Alastair Fitter, or Henry Ford from the contacts page.

Requests : We are always looking for more data. If you have any, we would be very grateful if you could contribute. Useful photographs and drawings 

will be much appreciated.

Henry Ford, Jan 2012.

News

Over the Summer the Associated Insect table update has now been completed.  Typogrraphical errors, and synonyms, have been corrected as far as possible, and authorships added  where missing. Some species remain untraceable. Do report any errors or discrepancies to Henry Ford from the contacts. Further photographs have been added and our first photographer from the community has contributed photographs to the database.

Currently:   A table of alien introductions from Natural England ( English Nature, 2005) is being incorporated, the Glossary is being updated with relevant drawings and  species continue to be updated

News

The last 9 months have seen the updating of the Associated Fungus table completed. Do report any errors or discrepancies to Henry Ford from the contacts. The NVC habitat codes for the flora have been updated, with subcommunity, constancy and abundance data. These data are now available for 1,066 plants. Photographs for some 400 plants have been added and we hope to have a further 100 plants photographed by the end of the year.

The next 12 months should see the continuation of updates, the addition of photographs,

 and the completion of the Associated Insect table check, and linking to the NBN gateway.

Missing Data : We now have a missing data facility, so everyone can now look and see what measurements we need to comlete the database, so for those of us still working on plants, please check the missing data facility for the plants you are working on and take a few extra measurements for the database.

Usage: The site continues to receive about 2,000 individual users per month. So thanks to our hosts 34sp.com for providing such a seamless service. And on January 1 we had 274 separate users. I think some members of our community need to get out much, much more........

Associated Fungi: The updating of this table is complete, with typographical errors corrected and authorships completed. Next will be the Insect Table

Updates of Ecological characteristics :  8 plants have had their ecological characteristics updated. Now that  the plant descriptions have been competed  and the first batch of photos has been uploaded this work will continue.

Links: Several new links have been added to our list or sites relevant to the UK flora.

Funding : The British Ecological Society have generously funded the Ecological Flora again for the coming year enabling us to undertake the major revisions that have been made. Further funding always needs to be sourced. Contact Prof Alastair Fitter, or Henry Ford from the contacts page.

Blog:  You can now post your comments here  if you wish to

Initial postings

Dear all,
This is an initial post for comments on the Ecological Flora of the UK : intended as a forum for improvements changes, comments, wishlists etc.

Henry Ford