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.