SDNHM Plant Atlas Project

This page last modified on 10 September, 2007

Notes to Plant Atlas participants:

• September 2007: XID Keys. Like Lucid (see following), XID is a tool for developing Multiple-Entry taxonomic keys. Over the last 6 + months, I've found XID is a much better alternative to Lucid - at least for Parabotanist level folks.  Three of these keys will soon be available for Plant Atlas participants. One of these, being developed by Flora-ID Northwest, provides comprehensive coverage of virtually all plants listed in the SDNHM Checklist. The second contains the same content as my Lucid-based Asteraceae key, covering all of the known Asteraceae species in San Diego County.  A limitation of these comprehensive keys is that they grow large and unwieldy when an effort is made to provide convenient coverage of relatively unusual plant details - those that can often trigger instant visual recognition by people already familiar with the plants.

  To remedy this limitation, I've been working on a smaller XID key designed to assist people (e.g. Parabotanists) with limited plant recognition experience to locate the Genus (and often the Species) of an unfamiliar plant. This key is linked to provide access to the entire set of plant photographs on this website.  At least temporarily, call this the "Quick-ID Key".

  Copies of my two XID keys will shortly be available here for downloading to your computer. To use them, you will need a licensed copy of the smallish XID "driver" program (just under 1 MegaByte, runs only under Windows) on your computer. One source of the program will be the CD-Rom disc on which the Flora-ID key is distributed. A few Plant Atlas participants will soon be invited to help test whether the Quick-ID Key meets its design goals, and to suggest possible improvements.

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• 28 June 2006: Those of you who attended the recent Plant Atlas Parabotanist Appreciation event at the museum either heard Mary Ann Hawke's reference to my work on a new key for identifying specimens of Asteraceae plants known in San Diego County, or you may have visited my demonstration of an early prototype stage of this key during the reception period. The key is now in a very usable stage covering all but 11 of the 317 San Diego Asteraceae species in the Checklist v.4, but it currently is still limited to plant characteristics published in the 1993 edition of The Jepson Manual. Since the Plant Atlas project has been contributing new information, in addition to much that has been learned about our plants since 1993, the key will need to be reviewed and updated to reflect current knowledge as much as possible. I'll need help to accomplish this, and have proposed to conduct a workshop at which interested Plant Atlas participants can learn about this new key, and about the Lucid3-3 key-building software on which is is based. See my "Multiple-Entry Key for San Diego Asteraceae species" page for details.

About the Plant Atlas Project:

The Botany Department at the San Diego Natural History Museum is conducting an ambitious project to catalog where the 1500+ native (and 500+ non-native) plant species are to be found in undeveloped areas. There are 150+ volunteer para-botanists assisting this project by collecting sample plant specimens from a grid of locations throughout San Diego County. For details, see the project's website at http://www.sdplantatlas.org/

On the PlantAtlas project's opening website page, you will find several thumbnail photographs sampled from  my own (this current) website. I've been cooperating with the SDNHM Botany Dept team, through a museum display featuring about 90 "fire-followers" species, and through efforts to interest local school students and teachers in environmental issues via plant identification during visits to parks and nature reserves.

The photographs and notes linked from this page are presented mainly for potential interest to the PlantAtlas Project volunteers and staff.

The following two hyperLinks display thumbnail-matrix index pages which allow you to locate the Family and Species photographs (on this website) for the numbered thumbnail photos that are displayed on the PlantAtlas website. Click over a matrix page thumbnail photo (e.g. corresponding to the same photo shown on the PlantAtlas homepage) to pop-up the "slide-show" (1024x768 screen size) window corresponding to that photo. Then, to display the Family matrix-index page for that plant, click the Family link in the left side frame of the slide-show window. (One temporary caution: I am in the process of upgrading all the families from 600x450 size slide-show photos to the larger 925x694 size designed to nearly fill a 1024x768 screen.)

• Details on SDNHM Plant Atlas Homepage thumbnail images.  
• Possible AddOns

If you are participating in the Plant Atlas project in some way, then I have three requests:

1. Tell me whether you think my main identification search key for San Diego wildflower species is useful to you, and suggest ways in which I might make it more useful.  It's an effort to make it a little easier for those of us lacking formal botany education to make reasonably accurate plant identifications based on visual evidence alone. 
   
2. Be aware that my species and family identifications are not all correct.  Please let me know about any that you think are seriously incorrect.
   
3. Please be patient when you encounter a family index page that still has no links to my "slideshow" format presentation featuring multiple views of each species.  You can display the zoomed version of the thumbnail photo by clicking the text link under the thumbnail. Several of the most commonly seen families (e.g. sub-categories of Asteraceae, Boraginaceae, Fabaceae, ...)  are still to be upgraded ... mainly because I've gotten bogged down on identifications. I have the detail photos, and could post them on the website. 

Once you are reasonably confident that you have identified the family, botanic name, or common name of a specimen, you'll find it's easiest to navigate to the photographs via one of the three main index spreadsheets (links at bottom of the main photo-oriented Key page).  In fact I have a tendency these days to bypass the Key in most cases, thus letting errors creep into the Key when I replace or add photos.

Feedback from you on all of these subjects will be most appreciated by E-mail to
    (with apologies for avoiding SPAM in this way).

Ken Bowles

This page last modified on 10 September, 2007 ======== Return to Ken Bowles' homepage (on Internet)