HerbariaViz: A web-based client-server interface for mapping and exploring flora observation data

The potential for physical flora collections to support scientific research is being enhanced by rapid development of digital databases that represent characteristics of the physical specimens held in those collections and make this information available remotely. One example is the unified database of California flora observations from the Consortium of California Herbaria that was developed to support the exploration of plant diversity patterns, distribution ranges of species, and vegetation associations for specimens held in physical collections. Many of the records in the herbaria database, and in complementary databases elsewhere, are geo-referenced; but, current web tools for accessing the data do not take advantage of that georeferencing. In this paper, we report on development and implementation of a web-based client-server map interface to facilitate open mapping and exploration of the dataset. Three research objectives were addressed: (1) develop a method for efficient web-ma...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ECOI
• Authors: Tom Auer, Alan M. MacEachren, Craig McCabe, Scott Pezanowski, Michael Stryker
• Keywords: Client-server Interactions, Databases, ECOI 2011, ECommerce, Point Data