Have We Got the Names “Right”?

The Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria met at the Biodiversity Centre at the University of Montreal on Friday, June 13 and Saturday, June 14. Talks on Friday were split into two engaging sessions on outreach and updates on member activities. A workshop was held on Saturday entitled, “Nomenclature & Taxonomy in Collections: Have we got the […]

Enhancements to the VASCAN Checklist Builder

The Vascular Plants of Canada website received some updates to its checklist builder today, making it easier to use. Provinces and Territories on the map are now clickable, the main occurrence options were reworded, and treatment of Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Greenland is now more explicit. Saint Pierre and Miquelon & Greenland The Vascular […]

VASCAN’s Web Service 0.1

Today we released a web service for the database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN). We did this in response to several requests from users that are not well fulfilled via a web site or via custom downloads. This new capability was several weeks in the making because we took great care to develop a […]

VASCAN portal and database are now open source

The Database of Vascular Plants of Canada (VASCAN) web portal and its database are now open source. The code is hosted on our Google Code site and can be used by anyone to create their own checklist portal. By doing so, we hope that the time and effort that went into developing VASCAN can benefit […]

VASCAN functionalities

This post is also available in French. Our Database of a vascular plants of Canada (VASCAN) is a bit over a year old now (launched on October 22, 2010) and the response has been great so far! The site is averaging 1,850 visits / 20,500 page views a month from over a 100 countries, and […]

Opening a Darwin Core Archive with Excel

One of the editors of VASCAN asked me for an Excel file with all the vernacular names in our database, so she could check them for typos. As the database administrator, I could have exported the names from our MySQL database, but I chose to approach the request from a user’s perspective instead. All VASCAN […]