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Calflora provides information on wild California plants for conservation,
education, and appreciation.
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About Calflora
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A Short History of Calflora (A list of collaborators appears below) Calflora was
started in 1994 by Ann Dennis while at the US Forest Service to
help assess how management practices might affect wildlife, plant
diversity, and forest health. Originally an 8-character DOS filename,
Calflora was a database of species information that could be downloaded
and used on a personal computer. Subsequent versions made the taxon
table a web-searchable database, and tested the three table concept
of taxon, synonymy and occurrence data.
In 1997, Calflora began
collaborating with the UC
Berkeley Digital Library Research Project to unite the Calflora
database with a collection of wildflower images. Digital Library
Project staff members including Ginger Ogle, Joyce Gross, Jeff Anderson-Lee,
and Loretta Willis have provided invaluable assistance in advising
and developing the technical infrastructure of Calflora. The nucleus
of the CalPhotos wildflower image collection was formed by a donation
of scanned slides from photographer and amature botanist Brother Alfred Brousseau
of St. Mary's College. Additional photo donations from the California
Academy of Sciences, California Department of Food and Agriculture,
and many private individuals. Calflora has worked with the Digital
Library Project to grow CalPhotos to well over 28,000 plant photos.
Other collaborators
have included the Texas A&M University Bioinformatics Working Group
and the UC Davis Information Center
for the Environment.
Tony Morosco also joined
Calflora in 1997 to begin assembling a library of observation data
on California plants, and has since moved into the role of technical
management and development of Calflora.
In January of 2000 Ann
Dennis, Tony Morosco, John Game, Emily Roberson, and Dean Taylor
founded the public benefit corporation The Calflora Database
to ensure the future of Calflora's information resources.
Calflora remains an
independent organization dedicated to providing scientific information
about California plants for research, conservation, and education.
Calflora is supported by a mixture of funding from government agencies,
grants from foundations, and private donors. Many other individuals
and organizations also contribute data, expertise, and technical
support.
Calflora Board of Directors and Advisory Board
Financial support for Calflora
has been provided by: |
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USDI Bureau of Land Management |
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UC Berkeley Digital Library Project |
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The JiJi Foundation |
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USDA Forest Service |
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USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service |
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and private donations |
Collaborators and Data Contributors
Calflora - 1700 Shattuck Av #198, Berkeley, CA 94709 - 510 528-5426 - CONTACT