Plant databases

PlantNET

PlantNET is our science website, created and maintained by Herbarium staff, delivering information about plants. PlantNET acts as a 'banner' or 'brand' under which the following web services are aggregated:

HerbLink: Provides details and photographs of type specimens held at NSW.
WeedAlert: Early Alert system for new occurrences within New South Wales of naturalised non-native plants.
Cycad Pages: Provides a comprehensive treatment of the world's cycads.
EucaLink: Provides specialised information on eucalypts (Angophora, Corymbia, and Eucalyptus).
Marine Algae: Provides search interfaces to the Herbarium's seaweed collections, to several overseas institutions.
Australian Freshwater Algae: Provides information about freshwater algae in Australia.
WattleWeb: Provides specialised information on wattles of New South Wales.
PNGPlants: is not part of PlantNET, but is hosted on the plantnet webserver. It provides information about the plants of Papua New Guinea - it was developed and is maintained by herbarium staff at NSW.
FloraOnline: Provides an electronic Flora of the vascular plants of New South Wales based on the printed Flora of New South Wales volumes (UNSW Press). Additional information is presented (distribution maps, botanical illustrations, photographs, weed status, TSCA status) from electronic sources maintained at the Herbarium.
Trees in the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain - interactive website for finding trees in the Royal Botanic Garden and Domain

Work is ongoing to keep PlantNET as up-to-date, informative and user friendly as possible. Targets are decided by a PlantNET Committee.

Plants in the Botanic Gardens

The following pdf files are alphabetical lists by genus of plants held in the three Botanic Gardens, including the collection of cultivars. The lists are current at April 2012 and will be updated every six months.

Data Management report 2011-2012

Gary Chapple - Plant Information Network Officer and Wayne Cherry - Technical Officer PlantNet

Collections Database

Specifications to modify the collections database were submitted to the software supplier. These modifications will improve the recording and management of plant names, their conservation status and weed status. The modifications were tested on a development version of the database and will be incorporated into a new version of the database which will become available mid 2012.

To better manage herbarium specimens sent out on loan a task notification utility was implemented in the Loans module of the database. A set of pre-recorded tasks associated with processing a loan forms part of a loan record and acts as a check list. Linked to this is an emailing system that automatically notifies user to indicate when a particular task should commence and when it has been completed.

The herbarium continues to receive electronic data for specimens donated to us by other herbaria, organisations and private individuals. This data is batch loaded into the database to facilitate the creation of specimen records and saves much time in the recording process. Specimen data was received from herbaria at Canberra, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, James Cook University and the Tamworth Agricultural Research Centre. Data was also received for collections from Bruce Wannan (Qld consultant) and Robert Gibson.

The Living Collections Administrator (Chris Ward) and the Gardens Information Officers, Jan Allen, Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Tracey Armstrong, Australian Botanic Garden, Simon Goodwin and Phillip Kodela, Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney joined Plant Diversity in 2012 to better manage our collections database and the application of botanical names across the organisation.

Australia�s Virtual Herbarium

Australia�s Virtual Herbarium (http://avh.ala.org.au/) moved to a new platform written and hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia (http://www.ala.org.au/). It provides access to specimen records from all of Australia�s state and national herbaria as well as provides feature-rich mapping facilities to plot and analyse plant distributions. Our specimen records are made available to Australia�s Virtual Herbarium through our BioCASE data provider which is refreshed regularly.

PlantNET

Work has continued to make changes to PlantNET to improve functionality and consistency. This has included the addition of symbols against plant names returned by spatial searches to flag noxious, Rare or Threatened Australian Plants and Threatened Species Conservation Act listed species.

We have also updated links to the Angiosperm Phylogeny website: (http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/welcome.html) that appear on FloraOnline�s family level pages and added links to Wikipedia�s family treatments.

We have initiated an investigation on improved methods of managing plant names with the view of publishing an online census of vascular plants of New South Wales. We have started to assess the possibility of managing FloraOnline and a future census from a new, dedicated module in our collections management system.

Finally, the access log-file analyser software, AWStats, was installed to provide usage statistics for PlantNET. Six months worth of data analysed indicates that PlantNET receives about 900 visitors every day.

Flora Online report 2011-2012

Louisa Murray - Flora Botanist

The updating of PlantNET has continued this year, particularly in the areas of Flora Online. Many family concepts used in the Flora Online are outdated, particularly in line with those recommended by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APGIII), where genera are now in other families than those formerly published in the Flora of New South Wales books, which form the basis for Flora Online. This work requires that taxa need to be shifted into new families and consequently new keys to taxa written. This process has only just started with the family Plantaginaceae. Also work has commenced on incorporating more photos into PlantNET especially with taxa that do not have a botanical illustration.

Algal Names Compiler, Yola Metti has completed a 2 year contract with Australian Biological Resources Study (ARBS) and Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) to update the freshwater algae names for Australia. This information has been downloaded by our Database Manager, Gary Chapple and will shortly be able to be viewed on the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI) website.

There was no funding to continue the position of Weeds Botanist this year, however tracking up-to-date information about weeds are a priority.

Living Collections report 2011-2012

Chris Ward - Living Collections Registrar

Development work on the new combined trees in the gardens website is now complete. The website extends the current trees website to encompass the Australian Botanic Garden and Blue Mountains Botanic Garden.

As well as accommodating text based queries, the new web pages also include an aerial photo interface allowing users to retrieve information about our tree collections by pointing and clicking or by selecting specific areas within each Garden. Work is continuing on the mapping of our tree collections at Australian Botanic Garden and Blue Mountain Botanic Garden and a launch of this new website is expected in October 2012.

The testing of smartphone access to the collections database is now complete. Using software originally developed by Museum Victoria for internal collections management, a workflow process has been developed to facilitate Gardens collections stocktaking, enabling the database to be updated via a smartphone. This system will be trialled and further enhanced in 2012/13.

PlantNET-Abutilon-megapotamicum---flower---L-Murray
A new weed: Abutilon megapotamicum (Malvaceae) now naturalised beside waterways near Newcastle on the Central Coast.