Re: Plant Mapping

Andreas Wistuba (A.Wistuba@DKFZ-Heidelberg.DE)
Wed, 6 Mar 1996 13:45:27 GMT+1

> I see a potential problem with this. When you want to place a
> circle or triangle over a particular habitat, where will you
> choose to place the center of the circle ? The really only
> logical place is right in the center of where the plants grow.
> This means that anyone wanting to find plants in that circle
> would probably find something if they just went right to
> the center. This would be especially true for the rarer
> species - in fact, the rarer the species, the more likely it
> would be to find plants right in the center of the circle.
> Of course, the exception would be habitat areas with "holes"
> in the center, or where there are a few very small sites
> scattered around different points in the circle. Of course,
> you could always offset the circle a bit in order to be
> misleading, but this would just add inaccuracy to the
> geographical data.

To be honest after having monitored the discussion for some days I
still do not understand where the problem is. If you really wants to
find a particular species in the wild you can at least easily find
out most type localities by studying the type description. And that's
exactly how things should be!
Imagine if one would write a protologue and would not give the best
information he/she has. Is this the kind of science you prefer? For
me that sounds a bit like middle ages style...
The consequence would be to limit access to university libraries to
the privilegued who are best in pretending that they are the right
people. Deep dark middle ages........
The same holds true for a mapping project:
I think that science simply has no right to select who will get information
an who will not. Conservation people should do their best to conserve
environments or plants but not information.

Andreas


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