To honor the passing of a friend or loved one, in lieu of flowers, remember the Native Plant Society Endowment Fund. It is also an appropriate place to honor the achievements of a friend, or to celebrate a birthday or anniversary. The Endowment Fund provides the funding for our annual grant to distinctive environmental projects and/or botanists. Your contributions will help us support this special work.
2003 Annual Grant: We award the 2003 Annual Grant to two students at Cleveland State University, Timothy Jones and Pedro Lake. They are Seniors at CSU and former students of George Wilder. Pedro is involved in creating a Manual of the Grasses of Ohio with completion due in Spring 2004. Timothy has worked on an independent floristic study of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, among other things.
They are in the process of developing an interactive key of the flora of Ohio. It will include an extensive collection of photographs that will be available throughout the identification process. The photographs will show the diagonostic features enabling the user to identify plants occurring in Ohio. Unlike a paper-based dichotomous key, the interactive key will allow the user immediate feedback regarding the precision of his diagnosis.
The interactive key will be written in DELTA format and be made available on the World Wide Web. DELTA has been adopted by the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases as a standard for data exchange. Such keys are becoming increasingly common and are extremely easy to use. The software required to view and use DELTA-based interactive keys is freely available on the internet.
Our Grant will be used to purchase a computer system dedicated to the management of immense amounts of information contained within the key in addition to functioning as the server. The system will consist of a 2.6 GHZ processor with 512 Mbytes of RAM and 123 Mbytes of video memory. Upon completion of the project, the computer system will be donated to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Serving as advisors to these students are Jim Bissell of the Museum and Dr. Barbara Andreas of Kent State.
2002 Annual Grant: The $500 annual grant this year went to Jason Hopkins for an inventory of the vascular flora of Jennings Woods in Kent, a heretofore unstudied area rife with special plants. The money will purchase a Global Positioning System and software which will remain the property of the Kent State University herbarium. At the end, jason will write a peer-reviewed manuscript that will be published in an appropriate journal. Jason will be leading our July 19th field trip to see Jennings Woods.
