[Taxacom] launching African Plants - a photo guide

[Marco Schmidt]

Dear colleagues,
 
We are happy to announce the launch of the African Plants Photo Guide (
http://www.africanplants.senckenberg.de/ ) – an online photo repository
of live plant images generally taken in the field and combined with an
identification help. The species are coded with 18 characters which the
user can combine freely. Of course, searching or browsing according to
taxonomic name (family, genus, species) is also available. 
In the moment we display > 25,000 images of ca. 3200 taxa. This content
is constantly growing. The nomenclature follows the African Plants
Database (
http://www.ville-ge.ch/musinfo/bd/cjb/africa/index.php?langue=an ) of
CJB Geneva and SANBI Pretoria. 
After having started with a regional portal for West Africa in 2008 we
expanded this to cover Central and East Africa in 2010 and we now cover
the whole continental Africa (excluding Madagascar). The regional
portals will remain for the time being but the new African Portal also
allows searching according to region. Region classification roughly
follows Brummitt´s World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant
Distributions. Ed. 2, 2001.
 
On the species page the available images are displayed and links to
various online ressources are provided to retrieve further information.
Images with coordinates are reported to the Global Biodiversity
Information Faciliy (GBIF) as well as Map of Life (MoL) as occurrence
data. Some images are fed into Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).
 
The images are displayed in screen resolution only. Free usage for
non-commercial scientific and educational purposes is granted. Should
anyone require images in higher resolution or for a commercial purpose,
the photographer as the copyright holder is contacted for agreement or
negotiations. 
We highly appreciate any contribution of instructive plant photos from
Africa preferrably with locality data to gain a better coverage of the
African flora and enhance the usefulness of the online photo guide.
 
Contact us on: westafricanplants at senckenberg.de
 
Stefan Dressler, Marco Schmidt & Georg Zizka
Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut Frankfurt/M. 
Botany Dept.
 
www.africanplants.senckenberg.de
 

Dr. Marco Schmidt
Senckenberg Research Institute
Dept. Botany and mol. Evolution
Senckenberganlage 25
60325 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
+49 69 97075 1615
 

Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Rechtsfähiger Verein gemäß § 22 BGB
Senckenberganlage 25
60325 Frankfurt
Direktorium: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Volker Mosbrugger, Prof. Dr. Andreas
Mulch, Prof. Dr. Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Prof. Dr. Uwe Fritz, PD Dr.
Ingrid Kröncke, Dr. Johannes Heilmann, Vorsitzende des Präsidiums: Dr.
h.c. Beate Heraeus 
Aufsichtsbehörde: Magistrat der Stadt Frankfurt am Main (Ordnungsamt)