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March 13, 2007
Commissioner Will Johnson launched the Website of Saba plants and lichens,
created by scientists at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), Saturday evening.
At a public showing at Tropics Café, Johnson "flipped the switch" by touching the
keyboard of the computer set up to project the site on the huge screen the café uses
for its Friday night movies. With plant specialist Dr. Scott Mori of the NYBG at the
helm of a laptop computer, the audience navigated through the site, which currently
has over 1,000 photos.
Each plant is represented by pictures taken by expedition photographer Carol Gracie,
there are images of the sheets of pressed plants prepared for the NYBG herbarium,
then details about the plant's identification with scientific and common names,
the location of the plant on Saba, which was collected by GPS coordinates, and other
particulars. Expedition leader Dr. William Buck, a specialist in mosses, said that
soon after the founding of the NYBG in the late 1890s, it chose the West Indies for
its first international expedition. The current group was very interested in
carrying on this tradition with this expedition to Saba.
The goal of the project, which is funded by Conservation International, is to
catalogue every plant on Saba. There have been previous plant surveys on Saba, with
some specimens processed and entered into herbariums, however, this information is
only available to scientists and is not organized in a meaningful way. The unique
part of the current project is that all information, specimen, photos, and plant
identification, are digitised so that it can be shared anywhere in the world. The
site is not copyright protected, so any interested person can download the images of
their choice. During the current 10-day trip, the botanists will gather more plants,
mosses, and lichens, which will be added to the site by Mori. Mori will also expand
the accessibility of the site by adding more common names and by creating pages of
flowers which look alike so that a search could be made on physical appearance
only.
Mori said it was important for the work to be continued by the Saban community, and
he encouraged young Sabans to take up a career in science. Senior Police advisor at
the Department of Environment and Nature in Curaçao Paul Hoetjes secured all export
permits for any endangered species the group is taking back to the NYBG. The website
for the plants and lichens of Saba is: sweetgum.nybg.org/saba/index.html.
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