Welcome to ghini-geoweb’s User Guide!¶
Here the user finds a small set of relevant articles, all related to describing a botanical collection, focusing on the two aspects of the collection: geographic, and botanic.
This User Guide is not intended as a definitive book on any particular subject, it’s just a set of articles. Each article in this User Guide solves a practical problem, it starts with a description of the initial situation and an anticipation of the intended result, and it describes the limitations of the approach taken.
The Articles¶
botanical collection - digital guidelines¶
the concept “accession”¶
Too often in the documentation you are reading you encounter the term “accession” and in no place there’s a decent explanation for it, or all explanations make no sense to you. This short article contains a description given by a user in the same situation as described, once she grabbed the concept.
New users not accustomed to the ITF2 nomenclature ask me why do they need pass through the “accession” screen while all they want is to insert a plant in the database. And what is this “accession” thing anyway?
Many discussions on the net don’t make the concept any clearer.
Our most recent new user gave an example which I’m allowed to share here.
»We got seedlings (one Planting with quantity 5) of Heliconia longa (a plant Species) from Carla Black (the Source), we named them 2007.0987 (a single unique Accession number) and we planted them all together at one Location. Now after several years, Accession 2007.0987 has not one but several Plantings at different places in our ‘Tanager’ garden, obtained vegetatively (asexually) from the first 5 plants. Plants obtained by sexual reproduction come in the database under different Accessions, where our garden is the Source.«
Anyhow, in Ghini you can add plant and accession within the same action: simply choose the “intended location” for the accession, and indicate that you want ghini to immediately add the plant at that location. By adding the “accession”, Ghini also adds the “plant”, using all the accessed plant material. Quite obviously, if you intend to split your new accession into multiple plants at distinct locations, you need to go through all the steps.
physical tags and labels¶
You know what is an accession number, and you want to clearly associate each plant in your garden to its accession number. You have a limited budget, you do not want to damage your plants, and you can only hope that kids will not be tempted to play with your precious labels.
there are basically three different types of labels in a botanic garden.
a primary label is one given to a plant while in the nursery, it describes the plant and is meant for internal documentation and it might look like this.
a secondary label is directed for the public and holds information about the plant as well about the species.
a tertiary label is similar to the primary label, it is meant for adult individuals on display in the garden, it is generally of aluminium, and it only identifies the plant with its record in the database.