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Synthesis of American Flora |
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Business Challenge
Synthesis of American Flora serves as an international standard for many federal government agencies, universities, colleges, and private conservation groups, including The Nature Conservancy. It provides the only comprehensive source for nomenclature and taxonomy for all known native and naturalized vascular plants and their associated synonyms (nearly 75,000 names), as well as the phytogeography, morphology and other data for the approximately 36,000 unique plant types.
This program enables plant taxonomists, horticulturists, nurserymen, foresters, wildlife managers, ecologists, and other plant enthusiasts to produce species checklists, distribution summaries, and species assessments for morphology, rarity, endemism, nativity, and other biological attributes. Since the program is entirely mouse driven, users no longer need to type scientific names in order to view distributional or biological attribute data, or to produce checklists anywhere within North America, from private wood lots to state or regional floras. This program consists of three integrated components: the Lexicon, Atlas, and Biological Attributes.
System Functionality
The system maintains a database of over 36 thousand plants, each with detailed descriptions and frequently with photos or specimen drawings accompanied by geographic and ecologic information. Using a number of query functions - by name, by geographic location, by climate zone, by origin etc. with Boolean operations the user is able to receive detailed information in "both directions"- i.e. both "where and how does a given plant grow?" and "what plants grow in a selected location", with various color-coded maps and references as required by scientists and students in botany and ecology fields, agricultural and forestry applications etc. The detailed parameters allow for queries to create a list of all plants that possess a specified quality, including human use plants, endangered species etc.
Summary
With its improved user interface, expanded database content and the new Editor and Update function Synthesis of the North American Flora is the prime information resource for phytogeography, plant ecology and related applications.
Key Features
- Plant name, image, description and geographic distribution database.
- Flexible compound queries to display, plant frequency by regions, the flora of a selected region, plants by parameters etc.
- Exporting query results in text format.
- Automated update of the database from a central repository.
- A local database editor.
Used languages & Technologies
- MS Visual Studio.NET 2003
- C# programming language
- .NET Framework v.1.1
- MS Access Database
- Borland Star Team - Versioning control tool
- Borland Together - visual modeling tool
- Microsoft Project - Project Management and Estimation tool
