Releasing and open-sourcing it early next year, but would love to get everyone's thoughts and suggestions while working on it, direct access here for example.
The guiding principle is to build something that's a) accessible to people curious about/new to botany while b) not sacrificing any scientific depth. What would be most helpful at this point, besides general critique:
- With all the tools already out there, what are you still missing day to day? What makes you think "gosh, I wish I could just see information x right next to y" or "I wish it'd be easier to find z"?
Specific questions:
- Right now it builds the taxonomy from 11 authorities ('ipni','wcvp','powo','wfo','col','tropicos','fungorum','mycobank','wikidata','inaturalist','gbif') and if one of them accepts a species, there's a dedicated page for it, even if others consider it to be a synonym. Is it better to have more information, or less 'clutter'?
- Currently working on a classifier that takes the ~700 million GBIF plant & fungi observations and finds the prevalent Holdridge Life Zone, soil type etc for each species. What else would be most interesting?
Stuff that already works quite well:
- The search (small icon top right) is quite snappy with autocomplete for scientific names, ability to search for common names in 200+ languages and directly by IPNI, Wikidata etc IDs, or filter by conservation status, year of 'discovery' and a couple of other things.
- Deriving the native climate of every plant based on the most representative locations also seems to work well, but please do let me know if you find species where it's just plain wrong/off, so it can be further improved.
Really appreciate everyone's feedback, good and bad, really hoping to get this right and making it a solid educational resource for people all over the world.
by brunohaid
2 Comments
Will you include Flora base in future?
No feedback, just can’t wait to use