GrassPortal planning in the Peaks

Last week saw the first meeting of all the GrassPortal project partners at Losehill Hall in the scenic surroundings of the Peak District (to see a bunch of scientists and IT specialists sliding around in the mud, take a look at Sam’s photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/reverendsam/sets/72157622978577032/). We were privileged to have our project partners come all the way from Kew, Switzerland and the USA. Unfortunately, however, for our jet-lagged American partners there was no respite as we dived straight into two work-intensive days, fleshing out the tools and functionalities GrassPortal will possess. It was extremely useful having a group of people with areas of expertise ranging from IT to ecology to evolutionary biology and systematics in formulating the design of GrassPortal.

After finalizing our “vision” for GrassPortal, we spent the last day creating an action plan for achieving our goals. The most immediate task that we need to complete is to interview potential end users to evaluate what they would want GrassPortal to do and the types of questions they would be trying to answer when using the portal. Through our various partners we hope to gather feedback from a wide audience, but this blog post is also meant as a call to anyone interested in becoming involved in this part of the project. All we would need from you is to answer a few questions in an online survey. If GrassPortal interests you, and you would like it to be able to do the types of things you require for your area of research, please contact me (Vernon: vernon@grassportal.org) or Colin (colin@grassportal.org) and we’ll make sure that we take your needs into account when developing GrassPortal.

GrassPortal - the basics

What is GrassPortal all about? Well, here are the basics. It is being developed as an ecological informatics service for the grasses - a system that acquires and processes ecological information about grasses on an enormous scale, covering every one of the world's 11,000 species. But all that goes on behind the scenes. Users of this system will be able to view information about the geography, environment and biology of grass species in an easily digestible form. Perhaps most importantly, they will be able to explore and visualize this information using tools specially designed for the job. Using this intuitive and easily navigated interface, we hope to attract users from a broad spectrum of research areas, and to develop modules that will enable this research tool to be used in teaching.

How will GrassPortal gather its information? Watch this space for more details but, again, here are the basics. Digitised herbarium collections and other species occurrence data will be used to define the geographical range of each species. This information will then be plotted onto a spatial representation of the global environment - including, for example, maps of climate, soils, fire and vegetation. By looking at where, and in what environments, each species lives, GrassPortal will then be able to summarize the environmental preferences of each species. This, in turn, will be linked to information on the biology of each species, and the evolutionary relationships between them. The result will be a fully integrated system that allows users to investigate the biology, ecology and evolution of grasses - all in a single location - and at a scale that (we think) has never before been attempted for plants.

Names for species

There are 60,000 names in use for grass species, but only 11,000 recognized species. So which name is the right one? Luckily, help is at hand from Kew herbarium scientist Derek Clayton, one of the world's authorities on grasses. Based on decades of accumulated knowledge, he has painstakingly assembled an exhaustive list of names. Applying strict rules of priority, Clayton established the accepted name for every one of the 11,000 species - a monumental task. Thanks to work carried out with colleagues Kehan Harman and Helen Williamson, this nomenclature database is available online.

The GrassPortal system will use the Kew nomenclature database as its backbone - the structure upon which all else is supported. Because, without a consistent and authoritative naming system, the biological, ecological and geographical data for each species will tangle into a confusing mess - something we are working very hard to avoid!

Fuelling humanity

Grasses are utterly mundane and completely ubiquitous for most of us, wherever we live in the world. Yet the importance of this plant group for humanity is hard to overstate. Early grasslands in East Africa were the arena in which humans evolved, and the origins of agriculture transformed the human way of life, ultimately underpinning the development of industrial societies across the Earth. Today's grass species include most of our staple food crops - wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, sugarcane, and millets - and form the pastures on which our domesticated animals graze. They are the fuel for human civilization.

This blog is about the science and culture of grasses. It has emerged from research on grass evolution and ecology at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and is linked to an exciting new initiative to develop GrassPortal - a public web-based portal that aims to increase our understanding of the biology, ecology, geography and evolution of grasses. As well as the latest news on this project, it will explore grasses from multiple perspectives, zooming in on individual species, examining the roles of these plants in the natural world, and analyzing our close working partnership with these most crucial of species.