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This beginning to the Species Home Pages of the plants of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste will eventually extend to the entire estimated 6,000 species in the ACG. It is being carried out by ACG personnel in collaboration with many national and international collaborators.
The overal philosophical goal of the plant Species Home Pages project is to prepare the ACG's plant biodiversity for non-destructive use by virtually all sectors of local, national and international society. The overall technical goal is to achieve this by constructing and putting on the ACG web site ((http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr) one Species Home Page for each species of plant in the ACG.
The specific goal is to complete the first 1000 Species Home Pages by the end of September 1998, and in the process evolve a protocol and experienced team to continue the project to completion over a number of years. This nine month goal, locally called the "Plant Subproyect of the ICBG", is financed by
* a part of the fifth year of a bioprospecting grant for ACG insects "Chemical prospecting in a Costa Rican conservation area" (from the ICBG - International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups, a Foggarty Center (NIH) program, financed by NIH, NSF and US-AID</fontfamily>), which is a collaborative research project between the ACG, INBio, Cornell University, and Bristol-Myers Squibb,
* the ACG, and
* a strong body of professional and paraprofessional volunteers.
This effort to make the ACG plants electronically and publically available originates in the chronic frustration of field biologists and administrators who are unable to rapidly and assuredly know what plant, flower, fruit, leaf or seed confronts them in their daily tasks - whether education, bioprospecting, research, restoration, biomitigation, management or simple curiosity. And, it originates in the realization that if society at large is ever to be able to begin to access the enormous amount of information tied up in tropical biodiverse habitats, it must also be able to know what plant is what, what it does, and where to find it.
The ACG wildlands are like an enormous library full of green fascinating books that no one can find. And when they are found, when they are in hand, they are nameless and therefore very difficult to read. What is so crazy about this situation is that of the thousands of species in an ACG forest, almost all are described. Almost all already have scientific names, and can be identified by specialists working in museums and herbaria, both locally and nationally.
This effort also has its roots in the contemporary reality
that we now have enormous power to accumulate, organize and distribute this
type of information, in strong contrast to the situation just a few years
ago. And, we can make this information electronically available to someone
in the field and the nearby office. Perhaps even more important, through
the general network of telecommunications that is rapidly moving into the
television in the livingroom, we can bring all this information freely to
the total public, and for any occasion. This is true democratization of
science, the true sense of the word "publish".
So, to avoid the clasic trap for professional biologists, the trap of insisting on feeling "done" before exposing one's life work to the public user, this project is taking a very pragmatic approach. We have modularized "the plants of the ACG" into thousands of units - one Species Home Page for each species. These units can be each constructed independently. And, to avoid investing the decades that potentially could be invested in each species, the proyect has decided to limit the content of the first Species Home Pages for each species to being an electronic basket that contains
* information that is readily available (identification tools, URLs to other places where there is already information about a species, copies of articles specifically on that species, etc.), and
* one Species Page
A Species Page, preliminary examples of which accompany this project introduction, offer for each species
* a species diagnosis for that species in the ACG, with emphasis on photographs and illustration/description of the traits that help to discriminate between species that are easily confused with each other,
* a brief description of where - ecologeographically - the species occurs internationally, nationally and within the ACG,
* a review, at the level easily available to the authors, of the natural history - including human uses where known - of the species in the ACG,
* brief and exact instructions as to where and how to find at least an individual or a population of the species in the ACG.
Where appropriate, the text is accompanied by a citacion of the information source, and the images in the html document may be backed up by high-resolution JPEG files.
The Species Page is like a publication when placed on the ACG web site,
and has a title, authors, and date of publication, and it is as inalterable
as is any hard copy publication. When there is more information available
for a given species, a new Species Page would be published by whoever had
the interest, just as occurs today.
The ACG recognizes that the details may well evolve over time. Furthermore, there will be some very complete and thick Species Pages, and there will be others very weak on information that do little more than help the reader know what species is in hand.
Simultaneously with the plant Species Home Pages, the ACG is searching for financial support to begin on the vertebrates and other groups. Because this effort can be carried out by the present ACG personnel and those paraprofessionals who can be produced, in collaboration with national and international taxonomists to confirm identifications, the only limiting factor to making all of the ACG plants available is finacial. The tecnical and human resources are on hand.
With the goal of illuminating the process a bit more, we have prepared a flow chart of project activities.
The Species Home Pages and Species Pages, as well as various documents within the Species Home Pages, are being prepared in Adobe Pagemill 2.0. The images are scanned with a Polaroid SprintScan and captured with Adobe Photoshop 4.0; the slides are scanned at 2700 dpi for high resolution and at 150-300 dpi for low resolution images in the html documents. Claris FileMaker Pro 3.0 is being used to accumulate and organize the field data and scanned images; this process will convert to Claris FileMaker 4.0 when the ACG is fully internet connected. The basic workstation is a Power Macintosh G3 with 96 MB RAM, 6.0 GB disco duro and Viewsonic 21 inch monitor. An APS 9 GB external hard drive is used to accumulate and organize images at present, with 1 GB Jazz cartridges as backups.
One member of the team works most of the time in the laboratory of the Centro de Investigacion del Bosque Seco in Sector Santa Rosa of the ACG. This person is responsible for constructing the Species Home Pages and the Species Pages, based on the information and photographs brought in daily. Ocasionally and preliminarily digital photographs are used to make Species Pages first drafts. Once the slides are developed, the digital photographs are replaced with scanned images. Owing to the difficulties of obtaining film and getting developing done in the field, the project uses Velvia ASA 50 rather than Kodachrome 25, which would be ideal but is not realistic because it cannot be developed in Costa Rica.
The drafts are revised for form and content by all five
permanent members of the team (Alejandro Masis, Felipe Chavarria Dias, Adrian
Guadamuz, Daniel Perez, Roberto Espinosa) and occasional collaborators.
The goal is the first publication of 1000 Species Home Pages at the end
of September 1998. The emphasis in the first species is on wet forest species
(from near the volcanos, cloud forest and rain forest to the east), and
in the species most frequently encountered.
For more information about Plant Subproject, contact the Programa de Investigacion of the ACG at (acg@acguanacaste.ac.cr), or Alejandro Masis (aamasis@acguanacaste.ac.cr), Felipe Chavarría (fchava@acguanacaste.ac.cr) or Daniel Janzen (djanzen@sas.upenn.edu). For more information about the ICBG project "Chemical prospecting in a Costa Rican conservation area", contact Ana Sittenfeld at asitten@maruca.inbio.ac.cr
10 March 1998
