A Neotropical Savanna » Blog info

Two New Features

mary — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:00:48 +0000

If you look at the black menu bar under the title of this blog, you will find two new entries: List of Families and Leaf Arrangement.

The List of Families page allows you to browse through every Family that has been mentioned in this blog, and gives you links to every post that features plants in that family.

This page differs from the Description of Families page, which has been present for some time. The Description page gives overviews of many plant families, with some examples, but no attempt has been made to include a link to every post that mentions that family. The purpose of this page is to give a sense of how a family might be recognized in the field.

The Leaf Arrangement entry consists of a main page and four sub-pages. This entry was designed to help you compare the leaf arrangement of a plant that you have just seen with examples in this blog of plants having the same leaf arrangement. If you are hoping to identify a plant you have seen here in western Panama, using the Leaf Arrangement approach will be the fastest way to discover whether that plant has been described here.

I hope you find these additions to the blog’s structure helpful.

2012

mary — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:28:22 +0000

Personal reasons have kept me from posting since last October. This long interlude has been fruitful, though. I’m evaluating how best to make the information on this site more useful for plant recognition and identification.

I’m leaning toward creating an online database of the species I’ve identified. So far, I’ve looked closely at doing something with Encyclopedia of Life and at using the database software called Biota. Although Biota is close, neither one fits exactly what I have in mind, so now I’m looking at ways to use spreadsheets in WordPress vs. ways to get the data into MySQL where it can be tapped by a script in HTML.

Details aside, I will continue working on this issue for the next several weeks.

Now that I’ve broken the ice, I’ll provide progress reports along the way.

Thank you for your understanding.

In the meantime

mary — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:27:06 +0000

My long posting hiatus is continuing, but this video came my way today and I thought it might be of interest to some of you.

Index to Families Updated

mary — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:07:06 +0000

So far in this blog I’ve looked at 24 plant families in some detail. That’s about 0.07% of the number of families listed in the book Neotropical Plant Families! But, to be a little more realistic, Trees and Shrubs of Panama covers 56 plant families, if I counted correctly, and that’s closer to my goal of learning the conspicuous plants of the savanna, so I might believe that I’m about 42% there! At any rate, this note is to let you know that the Index to Families page has been updated to include families recently covered.

The page lists each family discussed so far, with a brief summary that includes Description, Identification, and Examples. You may also click on the family name to see all the posts related to that family. I hope you find the page useful.

Happy browsing!

Sorry for the inconvenience

mary — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:35:00 +0000

The feed burner and email subscription links in the right hand column have been subscribing you to my old blog at wordpress.com. Sorry. My fault entirely. The links should work as advertised now, so please sign up if you’d like.