Hey guys hope you're all doing well, I have some information that I feel many on here might find intriguing...

As some of you may know, I'm a university student (taking a school-mandated semester off) and through some of my connections, I was able to get one of my old professors to talk to one of his out of state contacts (all it took was a fifteen minute talk about ethnobotany) and ultimately got my hands on a Draft copy of BONAP's Floristic Synthesis program. I can already hear you guys asking, "Snozzleberry, just what is a floristic synthesis?"

Well, what if I were to tell you guys that apparently there is an American botanist who has taken the time to compile a list of every vascular plant that grows in North America. Not only that, but this list is associated with a map of North America that not only breaks down the US into states, canada into provinces (and has the islands that are essentially US colonies) but then breaks down the states into every single county and shows you what plants are in which county.

In addition to the map layout, there is a features section which allows you to select from god knows how many plant characteristics and ultimately generates a list of plants that fit the description. So, if you had a plant in your hand and selected the checkboxes for what you were seeing, it could essentially tell you what the plant is.

I thought that this would be very helpful for people trying to do extractions on local grasses or identify/locate other ethnobotanicals that are indigenous to their areas.

I'm really excited and it's kinda early, so I'm not lengthen this description, but if you have any questions or comments, post em in the thread and I'll get back to you ASAP.

here's an example of what the GUI looks like and a one-state plant query:


This shows a county breakdown of the US with the attribute query's at bottom left, each box expands to an incredible amount of options:


Here's a different way to query, this section gives options based on everything from habitat, to drug use, to economically important plants, the image shown has options that would be interesting to us showing, i.e. horticulturally important plants, human use plants, drug plants, native american medicinal plants, etc...:


Here's the county breakdown of someone searching for the plant Draba Aprica, the counties are in yellow because it's rare in those counties:


Aaaaand, here's a state breakdown of Phalaris Aquatica, followed by cannabis. Phalaris and Cannabis are blue cuz they're exotic in every state, noxious in some (i think its purple there when you search that, hooray for politics effecting botanical categorization):

edited - maps should now be visible

Cool! Is this program going to be publicly available? Here's a link to a free to use online program for (Pacific Northwest)fungi identification. The program's creator (Ian Gibson) actually makes the stand alone program available for just the cost of shipping and handling or he used to. It's called Matchmaker for mushrooms. If you use the first pulldown menu and click on New Match you will get check boxes for identifying features that will help lead you to the identity a fungi species. It is kind of similar to the program you show for plants but doesn't show you where you will find them.
http://www.forestry-dev....atchmaker/MatchMaker.asp

The program will be available to the public in several months. From what I understand, the plant database and county registries are in the process of being updated and there's also something like a quarter of a million hi-res photographs that need to be added. The program uses an autoclave and so the manner in which search terms can be combined makes this thing incredible. If they can figure out a way to make a future version for smartphone or pocket pc, this could be an invaluable field tool, as there are hi-res images of nearly every plant. I will be posting something when I hear about it, as I will most likely be purchasing the full version.

Whoa.



Definitely do. I will watch this thread until then.

Thank you for posting this.

I look forward to this.

they have a demo of this program free for download at http://www.bonap.org/synth.html

unfortunately, it isn't compatible with a 64-bit system, so I can't try it out.

yea, that's true, but you're not missing much, it has, literally, only a handful of plants, a fraction of the search features, and less everything. I didn't post the link cuz it's a 1MB app that, imo, from what i've seen thus far from my draft version, is a very poor representation of the program as it stands today (it's also the same demo they've had since '99)

This is awesome. Certainly a NICE database to have handy. I wonder if they'll map the world eventually .