Re: plant DB

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>]

Finally bought a copy of your new book, at Borders, btw. Very fine!
Great pic of the author. :-)

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001 10:14:55 -0800, Toby Hemenway
<hemenway@jeffnet.org> wrote:

>As I've followed this thread, my leaning has been that the PFAF DB does most
>of what is done by the plant DB we have talked about here, 

>except for local
>or specific DB's like the one Miekal originally described. But Georg's note,
>that

That alone is ample reason to create regional DB's: North America,
Central/South America, Asia, Pacific Rim, UK/ScandinaviaE-W
Europe/Former USSR. A US/Canada DB would be especially useful. 
Why would PFAF go outof their way to add plant info specific to UC/C;
might never happen and we need access to a robust centralized DB for
these areas, not just PC professionals but urban/rural homesteaders
and homeowners everywhere.

This is a dream project and, in view of the interest expressed so far,
there's no reason not to get on with it.

>>pc designers might know of different propagation
>> strategies, uses (designers are aware of uses other people pay no attention
>> to, e.g. fire-retardancy  . . .
>
>raises an excellent point. A few of these uses show up as search fields in
>PFAF (biomass, insectary, etc.) but permies, being oriented so strongly
>toward function and relationship rather than size, color, or other physical
>quality,  do make observations that horticulturists or botanists don't. The
>question for me then is whether it's worth constructing a new DB based on
>that, or just to add those qualities into an existing DB. It seems simpler,
>perhaps, to organize these qualities as prose, as observations specific to
>each plant, rather than adding dozens more fields to a DB, or we risk having
>vast numbers of blank fields for each species.
>
>But the idea of a guild DB . . . how many times have I been asked, "is there
>a list of guilds for me to work from?" And the answer, outside of some
>academic literature about the tropics, or listings of native plant
>communities, is no. So perhaps it's time.
>
>How would a guild DB be organized? I'm not a DB person, so I can only speak
>from a user/permie viewpoint. Guilds can be organized several ways:

The guild info could/should be another field in the plant db or a
subset within it with its own array of fields (if that can be done).
>
>-Around a central element, such as a tree.
>-Functionally, as a set of connections among insectaries, N-fixers, mulch
>plants, etc.
>-Structurally: plants that physically fit together--edge plants, understory,
>vines, emergent trees, rooting depths, etc. that combine into a unit.
>-Analog guilds that mimic natural plant communities.
>-By environmental gradients: plants that like the same climate, soil, or
>other conditions and thus tend to cluster.
>-By natural selection: the end result of winnowing of high-diversity
>plantings, survivors of various selection processes (neglect, drought,
>disease) that stabilize into a cohesive group (I've generated a few of these
>accidentally, and then have duplicated them elsewhere successfully; I like
>'em).
>And then there are groupings of plants that are just random collections and
>not guilds (and how do we know the difference?).
>
>Maybe I'm starting at the wrong point, because these varied definitions of
>"guild" make it difficult to determine what are the useful relationships to
>list in a DB. Each of the above guild types is ordered by different types of
>relationships, thus constructing a Db based on relationships is a challenge.
>
>So maybe it's useful to ask, How would someone searching a DB for a usable
>guild find what they are looking for? What would they be looking for--a
>guild for a particular location, function, or what?   Or are there so few
>guilds--maybe only a couple of dozen?-- that a simple listing would suffice?
>
>Since I'm generating far more questions than answers, I'll leave off for now
>and think about this some more. But a key question, it seems to me, is what
>would someone use a guild DB for? That would help structure the DB.
>
>Toby
>_____________________________________________
>For a look at my new book on ecological gardening,
>Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
>http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm
>
>
>
>
>


L.F.London ICQ#27930345 lflondon@mindspring.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech  london@ibiblio.org