The Plant Encyclopedia, the definitive online gardener’s resource.

Nov. 18, 2010 - PRLog -- ThePlantEncyclopedia.org offers something new, and not possible in traditional gardening books. The website holds more plant pages than possible in a paper book, and covers cultivated plants across the entire planet, along with beautiful hi-res plant images. A resource for gardeners globally.

The Toronto, Canada based ‘start-up’ company Aden Earth, has developed this ‘world’s first’ for plant enthusiasts. Currently 25,000 plants are listed with new plant pages growing daily. Why are the pages growing daily? The answer is that the website is what’s called a “Wiki”.  

The Plant Encyclopedia website is “Public-Authored”, using the same technology developed by the organization behind Wikipedia. Anyone can author any plant page, and this activity is moderated by The Plant Encyclopedia community of authors itself.  Plant Lovers are a passionate group when it comes to their hobby. Volunteer authors take pride in their articles and edits.  This system of community authoring is what has created the amazing platform of Wikipedia, and is now doing the same for The Plant Encyclopedia. The Aden Earth team has taken this open-source, not-for-profit, and open-sharing model and re-built it to create a site that makes it extremely easy for gardeners, horticulturists, and botanists to instantly find plant information.

The website has several other innovations not possible in traditional paper gardening books; huge hi-res images allow zooming to examine plants closely and aid in field plant identification; that combined with The Plant Encyclopedia’s massive database allows it to list plants on a global scale, something un-paralleled anywhere. Of course it has never been possible for one gardening book to cover all the cultivated plants of the entire planet, yet this is the goal of the Aden Earth team and they are already close. They proudly boast listing of all the major “plant genera” used in the horticulture industry world-wide.  

The Plant Encyclopedia can be used on a phone, iPad, or laptop and taken into the garden where it’s needed.  Landscape Professionals and Companies find it’s portability useful to showcase plants to clients.
The Global Guide To Cultivated Plants

(a print resolution version of this image is available at http://theplantencyclopedia.org/images/c/ce/Ipad.jpg)

All media within is protected by an international Creative Commons License. This license allows the encyclopedia's material to be used an open resource for the public of the world to add-upon, improve, and share.

This milestone is creating horticulture history and is an unusual achievement for such a small 'start-up', company such as Aden Earth, but that’s not all they have created in their short existence as an organization. Their very first project created the something just as innovative from a historical and global perspective. The first ever World Plant Hardiness Zone Map.

(A print resolution version of this images is available at http://theplantencyclopedia.org/images/3/39/World_Plant_H...)

This map can be used with any plant, gardening book, or nursery plant tag, anywhere on Earth! The Aden Earth team carefully matched their 20 zones to minimum temperatures making it easy to match an Aden Zone quite accurately to a zone from any system used anywhere on Earth.

This map and it’s system of Aden Earth Hardiness Zones (based on the USDA Hardiness Zone Scale) is the first to ever index the entire planet.  It was possible for the Aden Earth team to do this because of data and satellite images newly available online.
This data has been gathered over the last decade to track climate change, providing minimum global temperatures to an accuracy of 50 square km, exactly what was needed to fill in the blanks of planet earth for gardeners and botanists globally. The Aden Earth team had to map areas like South America and most of Africa from scratch, but thanks to the Internet was able to do so for the first time in history ever applied to cultivated plants.

What’s next for the Aden Earth team?  For now they want you to login to http://ThePlantEncyclopedia.org , add your favourite plant, and ‘share’ it with your friends.

Follow this project at http://Twitter.com/PlantEncyclpdia

With their next development project, AdenEarth.com, the Aden Earth team promises more tools to help gardeners across the world create their own Gardens Of Aden.