About the Wildflower Guide

Introduction

This is a simple identification guide to common and distinctive wildlfowers found in parks and natural areas in Toronto. The species composition in the guide is based on wildflowers that we find along the trails when we take short (about 1 hour) hikes in the city. The guide is not intended to be comprehensive. While it will build through time as we make trips in all seasons, and as we become more observant perhaps, it will remain a guide to wildflowers that anyone who visits these areas can find without special knowledge. Our target audience is the family of four who we believe is not being helped at present (for more on this please see our article).

Why we created the Guide

The creation and development of this guide forces us to get out into the field and document the species we find. Trained biologists we may be, but as naturalists we were woefully ignorant of the local flora in our adopted home. It seems to be working, and it is gratifying to be able to hike an area now and recognize a good proportion of the wildlfowers we encounter along the trails.

In addition, this guide provides us with a tangible way to develop, test and refine new technologies to help authors and institutions publish nature guides.

Finally, we believe quite passionately that the casual visitors to our parks and natural areas are poorly served by way of local guides and interpretive resources. So, ultimately we hope that this online guide might prove useful to the family of four. For more on the challenges that we feel park administrators face in educating the public, please see our article.

How we do it - the nuts and bolts

The photos are taken by us in the field using a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. The text accounts are compiled by us from existing sources and our own notes. While we do not claim to be botanists, we do feel that our training as biologists helps us to interpret our observations and research and compile our descriptions. Species names are derived from authoritative sources, primarily:

Newmaster, S. G. et. al. 1997. Ontario Plant List. Ontario Forest Research Institute, Sault Ste. Marie.

We use our Guides-on-Demand system to manage content and publish the HTML version of the guide. Guides-on-Demand is a system to create and publish checklists and field guides in multiple formats from a single database of content. At the heart of the system is an XML-based content management system which stores species accounts (text) and accompanying images as objects in a database.

The style of the guide is created separate from the content and only merged to produce the final HTML pages at the end. This allows for content to be automatically compiled from the database independent of style, which streamlines the formatting of pages and the output of documents as digital files.

Further details of our system can be found in this article.

More info

If you think that this type of guide might be helpful on your own Web site, we would be happy to talk. If you have existing content, then you may want to use a customized version of the content management system and style. Alternatively, you can use our content and design on your site.

Please contact Mike Dennison directly at 416-696-7230, or by e-mail dennison@hopscotch.ca