From the author,

Lachlan Scanlan

The intention of Queensland Native Seeds online Plant Profiles is twofold.

Firstly, it provides a quick reference centre for associates and clients who are seed collectors, rehabilitation operators and others who access volumes of data when decision making. The information profile is not designed to be comprehensive. It does provide a fast view of taxon morphology mainly through photography and otherwise limited notation. Geographical distribution is important to potential users and is well covered. Some notes on ecology, edaphology, topography are deemed very important, however these will become increasingly comprehensive after the website is launched. The author will continue adding to this work over several years as travelling allows more photography.

Secondly, it provides some new data online for all other interested parties who research Australian native plants.

We seek to promote a quality, collective data set in the public domain and limit paraphrasing of work already done. The preference is to directly quote and support the best public sources (reference material) through citation and prompting of users to delve into those references for further elaboration where needed.

Regarding original content, additional quality photography is often deemed of high value in this regard. Where appropriate, new original information will be added to possibly increase a current understanding. Examples of this include occasions where we discover taxa in locations or on edaphic sites not previously noted. We have also added some limited notes pertaining to the activity of commercial seed collection.

It is the intention of the author to encourage professionalism in the field of environmental work. It is envisaged that in a world where basic material needs are increasingly met at low real cost, that increased attention may be focussed on areas such as protection of environmental values. In many cases these have needed unimaginable time spans to materialise and yet they are so easily and so quickly lost.

Since there is considerable value in new photographs of Australia’s native plant taxa, we have not used any photographs other than those we produce.

Citation method

As can be inferred from the statements above, these works will contain a high proportion of direct quotes. It is our stated intention already to promote the use of high-quality reference material in the public domain. Therefore, informing users of sources is important. To make researchers and workers involved with Australian native plants aware of information and its sources, we provide attribution and denote verbatim quotations with quotation marks. We note the use of directly quoted material without such protocol elsewhere online. In the authors view this does not support the creation of new and valuable public knowledge because it obscures the source of knowledge claims thereby preventing the reader from a deeper study.