Unlocking the Classification of Plants

October 10, 2014 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Unlocking the Classification of Plants

Linnaeus originally began designing and developing his taxonomic system by studying and classifying plants. This is the core, the foundation of the science and art of taxonomies today. This information came from the obscure, but interesting blog, tingilinde, in their post, “taxonomy.”

For more than a century, taxonomic information was locked away in a variety of dusty journals in vast libraries, where most people could not find or access it. Science didn’t stop progressing in this time, in fact it has been moving forward at a growing rate, which makes it important to be able to rapidly access this information.

In an effort to provide a solution, the people in charge of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have created a global online resource that catalogs the taxonomy of monocot plants. This resource, eMonocot, unlocks biodiversity data for the monocots for the first time so that anyone — whether a senior-level researcher or a student writing a school report — can access the latest tools for identification and descriptions as well as up-to-date checklists, along with links to other resources.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

 

 

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.