Suggestion for Species List

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foxd
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Suggestion for Species List

Post by foxd »

Aside from the usual information displayed, I think it would be very useful to have the scientific description of a species also available (probably as a link) so that we can compare that with what we think we have. It would go a long way toward rooting out confusion between species and identifying unknowns.

Perhaps this could even be extended to entering the characteristics of an unknown plant and getting a list of possible species.
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Roy
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Re: Suggestion for Species List

Post by Roy »

foxd wrote:Aside from the usual information displayed, I think it would be very useful to have the scientific description of a species also available (probably as a link) so that we can compare that with what we think we have. It would go a long way toward rooting out confusion between species and identifying unknowns.

Perhaps this could even be extended to entering the characteristics of an unknown plant and getting a list of possible species.
That definitely would be a good thing to have, but I wonder who would be writing the scientific description of the various bamboos? Could we use descriptions from published books? If we did, would it be enough to give author, book title, page, copyright..............?
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foxd
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Re: Suggestion for Species List

Post by foxd »

Roy wrote:
foxd wrote:Aside from the usual information displayed, I think it would be very useful to have the scientific description of a species also available (probably as a link) so that we can compare that with what we think we have. It would go a long way toward rooting out confusion between species and identifying unknowns.

Perhaps this could even be extended to entering the characteristics of an unknown plant and getting a list of possible species.
That definitely would be a good thing to have, but I wonder who would be writing the scientific description of the various bamboos? Could we use descriptions from published books? If we did, would it be enough to give author, book title, page, copyright..............?
I have to wonder if copyright would really matter if we take the description and put it into a particular, computer search-able format. The result would depend on the characteristics of the plant itself.

For that matter, a table of bamboo characteristics for the columns and bamboo names for the rows. Values in the table would most likely wind up being things like Yes, No, None, a Number or Color. Such a table would tell us what we don't know as well.
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The legal issues that will arise when the undead walk the earth are legion, and addressing them all is well beyond what could reasonably be accomplished in this brief Essay. Indeed, a complete treatment of the tax issues alone would require several volumes.
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RE: Suggestion for Species List

Post by Chris S »

The problem with descriptions is that they were often written by different people who look at the species in different ways, maybe using different terminology, often in different centuries, or with different parts of the plant, like one person had flowers, another didn't.

An attempt has been made to make the descriptions comparable by interpreting the original descriptions in terms of a strict list of character states. That is Clayton's Grasses of the World online database. Judge for yourself whether it worked for the bamboos.

The descriptions really need to be revised and rewritten across species to make them comparable. There is along way to go. The Flora of N America project started to try to do that for the cultivated bamboos, but there just wasn't enough money to carry on.

There is no problem linking to such information, when it is available. That is just what I am doing.

Chris
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