FloraGator - Sources and Credits

sources - credits

Sources

Books

Plant Systematics (second edition), 2010, by Michael Simpson
ISBN 978-0-12-374-380-0
An outstanding book. Very readable, informative, and accurate, with hundreds and hundreds of color photographs illustrating the different families. The section on plant morphology (Chapter 9) gives a thorough and precise review of the terminology used to describe plants, and it would be the best place to get more information about the terms used in our key. This book doesn't describe each family to the level of detail found in our other sources, but it provides a good overview and it was always the starting point for our research.
Guide to Flowering Plant Families, 1994, by Wendy B. Zomlefer
ISBN 0-8078-2160-8
This was one of the oldest books we used, but also one of the most detailed. Each family is illustrated with beautiful line drawings done by Zomlefer herself, and at the back of the book there is a very nice glossary with drawings to illustrate each term. The book was written long before APG III (or even APG I), but Zomlefer seemed to have a very good sense of where the classifications were headed, and her groupings are very close to the modern system. (We would love to see a new edition of this book with families that match APG III!)
Flowering Plants of the Neotropics, 2004, edited by Nathan Smith
ISBN 0-691-11694-6
A beautiful book that gives a thorough and well-organized reference for the families of the tropics. Most of the families are illustrated with black-and-white line drawings showing the crucial details, and there's also a section of color plates in the middle of the book with beautiful, large photographs. Within each family description there's a consistent set of paragraphs covering distribution and habitat, family classification, features, economic uses, and other topics. The family descriptions were written by different authors, making the quality inconsistent, and a few families get only token coverage of a page or less, but hopefully they will get more attention in future editions. This is one of the best sources for obscure families like Dipterocarpaceae or Rhabdodenraceae.
(Side note: This is the only book on our list that splits the families into monocots and dicots and then arranges them alphabetically. That organization might offend the purists, but it certainly makes the descriptions easier to use.)
The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants (Vols I-X), 1990-2011, edited by K. Kubitzki
ISBNs 3-540-51794-4, 3-540-55509-9, 3-540-64060-6, 3-540-64061-4, 3-540-42873-9, 3-540-06512-1, 3-540-40593-3, 3-540-31050-9, 3-540-32214-0, 3-642-14396-2
This 10-volume set is incredibly expensive and rare, but it provides some of the most precise and detailed information you can find. The contents are arranged phylogenetically, and each family description is followed by a dichotomous key and shorter descriptions of the subfamilies and genera. The earlier volumes were written before APG III even existed, but the classifications are close to that pattern and the lists of genera make it fairly easy to sort things out. These books do have more errors than the other sources on our list, probably because they are such a huge undertaking, but the overall accuracy is still very high.
(Note: Each book only provides a index to the scientific names, but the full text of the set is searchable through Google Books. If you assemble an electronic bookshelf by putting in all 10 ISBNs, you can do a search for any term or string. Google Books will give you the page number where the term appears, but you will still need to have the actual books to see the reference.)

Journals

For the most up-to-date information about family classifications, one has to look in scientific journals. There are hundreds out there, but the most useful information for this project came from these three: Taxon, American Journal of Botany, and Kew Bulletin. (From the last of those sources, we were particularly fond of a paper with the [partial] title of "When in Doubt, Put It in Flacourtiaceae." Too true.)

Websites

The Plant List
( http://www.theplantlist.org/ )
An amazing website that aims to list all of the known plant species. It gives Latin names, synonyms, and very up-to-date classifications. As of this writing (2011) it includes over a million scientific names representing around 300,000 plants. Because it draws data from different sources, there are still some duplications that need to be sorted out. (Their Celastraceae, for example, includes listings for both Euonymous and Evonymous.) But this is still an incredibly helpful resource and it's the first place we turn when we want a list of the current genera in each family.
Neotropikey: Neotropical Families Index from Kew
( http://www.kew.org/science/tropamerica/neotropikey.htm )
A fantastic site from the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens that gives detailed descriptions for hundreds of tropical families. Each treatment includes a list of distinguishing characters, tips for generic identification, and a list of notable genera with their distinguishing features. There are also photographs and references to important literature on the family. This is one of the most readable and beginner-friendly sites on the web for accurate plant family information. They also did a beautiful job with their web layout.
(Note: Neotropikey also includes an interactive, multiple-entry key to the plant families. Because their key is java-based, it seems to freeze some browsers and we haven't had much luck getting it to work yet. Judging from the rest of their site though, it's probably pretty sharp.)
The Families of Flowering Plants by L. Watson and M. J. Dallwitz
( http://delta-intkey.com/angio/www/index.htm )
We love this site! The web design is almost defiantly retro, with no bells or whistles of any kind, but it makes the pages very quick to load and reliable. The family descriptions themselves are cantankerous, opinionated, and somewhat eccentric, but unfailingly precise and accurate. Watson and Dallwitz have split the families up in their own unusual system that doesn't always match up with the rest of the botanical world, but they list all genera included in each of their families. As long as you are careful to check the family delineations, the information here can be very useful.

- back to top -

Credits

FloraGator was inspired by the Flowering Plant Family Identification site built by Ray Phillips at Colby College. The biological illustrations we use are from the first edition of Flora von Deutschland Österreich und der Schweiz by Otto Wilhelm Thomé, published in 1885, and were downloaded as high-resolution scans from Kurt Stüber's online library of historic books. Some of the nifty bits of javascript we use to run the site include jQuery, jQueryUI, ScrollTo, and jqZoom Evolution. This project was funded by the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Florida through the 2010 CALS Minigrant Program for Distance Education. The Primary Investigator for the grant was Dr. Sandra Wilson of the Environmental Horticulture department. Aaron Sotala and Marion Douglas assisted with the programming, and Kristin Campbell assisted with image selection. Our alligator designs were created by the very talented Cory Thoman. Thanks to the great people at Stack Overflow for their help with the tricky programming questions. Thanks also to the University of Florida Herbarium where we conducted most of the research to assemble the family information. And a very special thanks to Nureet and Tyto for their love, support, and good cheer while this site was being constructed.

- back to top -