plants

Here’s a resource for all you neophytes, ahem, out there looking for information on pretty much any type of plant in North America and elsewhere.  Plant Information Online, a venture initiated by the University of Minnesota and its library system, freely offers numerous databases available for searching the green, including several on plant nomenclature as well as seed and nursery firms.  It’s a veritable, virtual library of of the good green stuff, searchable by scientific or common name, nursery and seed provider, and images associated with the desired plant. Initially I tried some simple common name searches, and found the interface a little clunky.

It’s more of an index with quick links to your search results, but after some patient and clever searching, you’ll find some interesting pics and info.  It’s probably worth delving into the nomenclature first before searching willy-nilly, but it’s definitely an ambitious project for anyone interested in plant info.

encyclopedia of life

Great new resource for all you scientastically curious infomaniacs. The EOL looks to be a great new reference guide to help classify and understand life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe just life.

In a nutshell:

Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:

Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.

Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.

Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth’s species.

Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Chock-a-block full of images, species overviews, a massive table of contents of each species, it’s taxonomic outline in multiple formats (text, graphical, source), and extensive references to all cited material, this online project, now in its beginning stages, is shaping to be an immensely useful and accessible resource for all future biologists and lovers of life.

One concern is that it may end up something similar to wikipedia, in which anyone can submit anything of questionable quality. I suppose submission won’t really be the problem but rather the means by which the material is reviewed and approved by the administrators for scientific acceptability. As one can see, the institutions involved in this undertaking are rather scientifically serious about what they do, so getting this right is fairly important. But as it already has established data partners to aid in verifying, safeguards are presumably in place.

Think of this as a renewable source of information and info-seeking behavior. We are only aware of approximately 1.8 million species on earth. How many more millions are still undiscovered and in desperate need of cataloging and classification?

carbon emissions database

CARMA is Carbon Monitoring for Action, a massive database detailing carbon emissions for both power plants and power companies worldwide. Search to find the levels of your local or global emitters, get updates, do research. As far as the data goes, here is a bit about CARMA:

For several thousand power plants within the U.S., CARMA relies upon data reported to the Environmental Protection Agency by the plant operators themselves as required by the Clean Air Act. CARMA also includes many official emissions reports for plants in Canada, the European Union, and India. For non-reporting plants, CARMA estimates emissions using a statistical model that has been fitted to data for thousands of reporting plants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and India. The model utilizes detailed data on plant-level engineering and fuel specifications. CARMA reports emissions for the year 2000, the current year, and the future (based on published plans).

CARMA also aggregates data on individual plants to the level of operating companies, parent corporations, and several geographic entities (continents, countries, states/provinces, and cities worldwide, with additional reports for U.S. metro areas, congressional districts, and counties). The database is updated quarterly to reflect changes in ownership, construction, renovation, planned expansions, and plant retirements. CARMA is meant to be a repository of the best available information on power sector carbon emissions. Our policy is to correct any errors or omissions if suggested revisions are verified by an independent third party.

Handy tool for you scientastic researchers.

greenbrarian

Ebsco is providing free access to its GreenFile, a periodical index database containing around 300,000 records, 4600 of which are full-text. Topics include climate change, renewable energy, recycling, etc. Libraries have been going green too, believe it or not.

Renew the environment with some research. Because its the 21st century, and someone has to.