The Plant Encyclopedia
By Judy Penz Sheluk


The global guide to cultivated plants

Imagine being able to design gardens and landscapes using a database comprised of 1.25 million plant species. That’s the goal of The Plant Encyclopedia, a not-for-profit wiki developed by Aden Earth, a Toronto-based digital technology company focused on horticulture. The passionate group of specialists is made up of business, technology, and horticulture professionals.
The Plant Encylopedia started with the Aden Earth team installing the platform Mediawiki (the same platform that’s behind Wikipedia). The effort has grown and has integrated sophisticated new semantic web technologies, specialized to plant reference, with a branching structure of categorization. Essentially, this branching structure mirrors scientific plant categorization and actually uses binomial nomenclature and the Latin names of plants to build the structure of each page and the architecture of the entire website.
“The goal is to make available the sum of humanity’s horticultural knowledge, open across the planet: It is the first truly global guide to cultivated plants,” said Ben Zlotnick, CEO & founder of Aden Earth. “Now even a novice gardener can add to the eco-botanical knowledge and make that information openly available around the world. The benefit to the ecology of the planet, and the landscapes in which we all live, is obvious, from creating beautiful environments through gardens, to growing food locally, to endangered plant propagation.”
Designed for fast and easy reference, passionate gardeners, horticulturists, and botanists around the world will author the plant pages and upload images. The website automatically structures information into the proper scientifically accepted branches of the “tree of life,” making them a fast and valuable reference all around the world. The site also includes a Garden Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which uses satellite thermal image data originally gathered by various agencies over the period of a decade to track climate change.
Currently The Plant Encyclopedia is in beta testing phase and lists more than 25,000 plants. March 2011, 300,000 more plant pages will be “seeded” by Aden Earth. To find out more, visit theplantencyclopedia.org.