Namibian Near-Endemic Plants Project - First Species Information Online
Information for the first 137 near-endemic plant species has been uploaded onto the Environmental Information Service website. These are the species from Acacia montis-usti to Commiphora anacardiifolia if you filter on near-endemic species and sort by species on the Plant Information System (http://www.the-eis.com/atlas/?q=plant-information-system).
It has been a steep learning curve for us all to get to this point. The procedures we used to gather information, analyse and database it, had to be adjusted time and again. The patience and never wavering enthusiasm of Sofia Amakali in re-doing, updating and changing things in the data gathering process, must be acknowledged here. The biggest challenge was getting the database to spit out the information in the desired format. Here we are particularly grateful for the assistance from Denis Filer, one of the developers of the BRAHMS database at Oxford University. Now that we have streamlined our workflow, we plan to add about 70 more species information sheets every three months to the website. Everything is not perfect yet and we hope for feedback from users to further improve our outputs.