From My 1996 Journal: Native Plants Online Project

I found it interesting to read my reasoning from 14 years ago about what an online computerized plant database I started making (and got distracted from and didn’t finish). I felt I had to justify it and tell how computerizing it and making it accessible on the newfangled World Wide Web made sense. Also fun to read is the equipment and software I used back in the dinosaur days.

ABOUT NATIVE PLANTS ON-LINE PROJECT
“The Advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” -James Madison

Yeah, James! Way to go, dude!!

ORIGINS OF NPOP
I initially got the idea for this project while camping in the Anza Borrego desert (in the Sonorran desert East of San Diego). One of the things I do when I when I go out there is to study the plant life. I have been interested in plants most of my life – growing them, identifying, them learning about them, photographing and drawing them – and there are many very interesting forms of life in the desert. It is fascinating to see how organisms adapt to a desert environment. But anyway, besides photography and drawing and writing, I also work with computers as a Macintosh consultant and repair wizard, problem solver, etc. I’m always trying to think of creative and useful ways to use the damn machines. I started taking a Powerbook with me on camping trips and running it off the solar power system of my Trooper (another story in itself – adventures of the photovoltaic-run refrigerator kind), using it mainly for writing. One of the tricky things about identifying plants is that if you only get to go out to where they live once a year or so, you forget what they are called – especially scientific names. Using books to identify plants can be tedious, especially if they are technical tomes like Munz’s “A California Flora”. Even the books with drawings, like the wonderful and classic Desert Wildflowers by Edmund Jaeger, can be quite difficult to use unless one already has a good idea what one is looking for. So it occurred to me that a visual database on the computer, where one could look through plant species, or search by various categories, would be very useful.

So I had this idea rolling around in the back of my mind for months. The clincher, the final motivator that got me rolling was when I found myself helping people when I was out in the desert, or here at home down in some of our locals canyons. I would see someone trying to identify plants and go over and try and help them out. Sometimes I would know what something was and could tell them some interesting things, but often as not I couldn’t. So working on this project is an extension of that wanting to teach, inform, and help, and also a great learning experience for me. I do not know all of the plants before I put them in the database, In fact I’ve started with ones I’m more familiar with, and the more outstanding and obvious plants, then go to ones I do not know. Even the ones I do know, I see with fresh eyes in the process, and learn more about when entering the information from research on the species.

A visual, searchable database of plants species on the computer has many advantages (and a few disadvantages). Having color pictures of every plants is one – though a book could have these, I have yet to see a book that has pictures – especially good photos – of every plant. So part of the function, and the contribution of this project, is that of a visual record. Another advantage will be in making it easier to identify a species based on many different criteria, depending on what one as at hand. Of course, there will always be effort required by the person wanting to identify a plant – the computer (or book) can’t do it for you.

Many times I have found myself simply thumbing through Jaeger’s book, or other wildflower books, trying to find a plant by visual cues, rather than trying to use a botanical key (quite difficult or nearly impossible for some people, if you have no experience or training in botany).
One possibility is to create an automated key, where the computer runs through the binary tree of possibilities according to the responses of the user. Botanical keys are already in the form of a decision tree, so it would be a matter of implementing this form in a computerized format.

The database also serves as a depository of interesting and useful information on plants – I want to include, for example, ethnobotanical information – how the species has been used by human beings. In this sense it can be a unifying project for various sources and kinds of information.

Obviously this is a on-going project, and one that can never be completed in any sort of absolute sense – there is always more to learn. One could also start to include more ecological information, since that is an indivisible part of the whole picture. For example, why does this species favor this habitat, or why and how has it adapted to take advantage of this particular niche? What are the soil characteristics that determine it’s growth? What animal species, insect, mammal, birds, are it associated with? How does it interact with other species? What does it’s growing here say about this particular place? There are an infinite number of questions to ask and explore.

WHO IS IT FOR?
Anyone interested in wild plants, wild flowers, wildlife, ecology, environmental issues, ethnobotany, etc. This could include students, teachers, naturalists, horticulturists, gardeners, botanists, campers, survivalists, ecologists, plant lovers, herbalists…you name it. Even you, Mr. or Mrs. Random Web Browser. (It would be really great if I could get someone interested in plants and nature that was not really aware of their wonderfulness before). And of course there will be people interested or using it for reasons I never thought of.

Basically, I am taking an inspiration, an idea I had of something fun, useful, interesting, worthwhile, that I was going to do for myself, and making it public, for anyone to benefit from. Which leads me to the next topic.

THE FUTURE
Initially, I was going to do this (multimedia) database in HyperCard. However, since starting to use HTML in the course of business, and seeing the potentials of publishing on the internet, I decided to make it public and sacrifice the advantages of HyperCard (good Find function, easy authoring, flexibility, etc.), to the cause of communication. However, a CD-ROM version may make sense in the future, becuase of the speed of access and portability.

I will continue to add to the database, hopefully at least one plant per day, as time and money permit. I of course have to spend the vast majority of my time making a living, and can only work on this for short periods in the evening or on weekends. The equipment is expensive – I do not make that much money as a Mac repair person/consultant (I’m self-employed so that I have freedom, not out of money-seeking) and this project is done purely out of love for the subject. Anyone with ideas on how to get funding for this project so I could devote more time to it, or is able and willing to contribute in some way please send e-mail.

One of the goals is also to take a video digitizer with me into the field, on my trips to the desert.
Eventually this database could expand beyond San Diego. For now I have my hands (and eyes) full.

THE EQUIPMENT
OK, for you tech-heads: I use a Sony Handycam CCD-TR400 video camera to get most of the pictures. Sometimes I have used a 35mm SLR, and scanned in the photos using a color flatbed scanner (HP ScanJet). A video clip is then captured using the on-board video-in “AV” capabilities of a Power Macintosh 8500/120 (32MB of RAM), using Adobe Premiere. I carefully go back and forth through the video clip of the plant in question and select the frame I want. This is exported as a PICT file and saved to disk. The PICT is then opened in Photoshop 3.0. The contrast and brightness are sometimes adjusted, and the image is often sharpened to bring out detail. The Image Mode is changed from RGB format to Indexed color (which means indexed to a pallette rather than (8-bit) RGB numbers), selecting the minimum bit depth that still looks good (usually 6 or 7 bits). The picture is then ready to save as a gif file. I use a shareware Photoshop plug-in called PhotoGIF. This plug-in allows one to save the GIF as transparent, interlaced GIF. For this project, I select the button for non-transparent. It then gives you a read-out of the size of the file, which is useful to know – let’s you anticipate how much users will have to suffer waiting for pictures to download. Once the image is saved as a GIF by this or a similar program or plug-in, it is then ready to incorporate into a web page document.
Most of the HTML development up to now has been done on a Powerbook 5300c, using BBEdit Lite. I keep Netscape running in the background and switch over to it, Reloading the page after making and saving changes in BBEdit.

REFERENCES
A California Flora, Philip A. Munz and David D. Keck
California Desert Wildflowers
A Natural History of California, Allan Schoenherr
Desert Wildflowers, Edmund C. Jaeger