Folks, does anyone know of any Australian native plant forums on which I can post photos of plants & request their identifications?
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I've been trying to find a decent Aust. plant forum in ages...
here? i hold a degree in horticulture and i can give it a crack...
Not to downplay zosterops' kind offer, but isn't there an area of ANBG (national botanic gardens) that will identify plants for you Woko? Or do they have a database that you can search?
Hi Woko,
I'm a big native plant nerd and I don't actually know of any myself either.
Certainly most state herbariums will identify plants for you if you send them a herbarium specimen with basic details of location, habit etc.
If you don't want to go to that effort and just want a quick guesstimate, I'm not sure.
It can be difficult, given there are probably about 30,000 species (compared to ~800 bird species for example).
Herbarium sites like http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/ or http://www.flora.sa.gov.au/ often have dichotomous keys for species that can help if you have a vague idea.
Cheers
Tim
Brisbane
Thanks for the ideas, good people.
Zosterops, I'll take you up on your offer. We'll give it a try & see how we go. Thanks.
Night Parrot, there is the Australian Plant Image Index but I find that it's usually tedious trawling through a host of plant photos trying to find the one that fits my specimen. As well, many of the photos are too vague to be able to make fine enough discriminations between species. Being a lazy sod I'd love to have a website which could identify plants from my photos of plants & their buds, flowers, fruits, leaves & bark.
Timmo, when I did a natural resources management course back in the day we studied keys for a short while. However, proficiency in key use involves learning a lot of plant parts & half the Latin alphabet, something I haven't been prepared to allocate time to. Being a lazy sod.... I do use Plant Distribution Mapper on www.flora.sa.gov.au/ quite a lot to determine whether a particular plant species might be local to my area.
Yeah that can be true about keys Woko. It really depends on the key, the target audience and the degree to which individual species differ.
I know the Qld herbarium have developed some keys to local Acacias and Eucalypts in SE Qld which are based on simple bark, leaf and flower characteristics which are handy.
Similarly, some of those Lucid keys are quite handy, as they are based on a kind of Venn diagram of overlapping attibutes not just simple dichotomous factors.
On the other hand, some keys need a microscope, six degrees in Latin and an intimate knowledge of botany.
Cheers
Tim
Brisbane
At the RBG sydney plant id service you can email them a picture and thety will try to id it if it has flowers. They take a couple of weeks which I think is reasonable since it is a free service.
Thanks, Greg. That's handy to know. I'll tuck that one away in my hump, for sure.
Today I met 2 botanists from the Natural Resources office in Mt Barker (SA) & they were most helpful. Local, too! I can email them photos as well as take in specimens & they have other contacts.