Site history

20-21 March 2014: The links page enormously expanded, following the approach used on the Zimbabwe site.

6 April 2012 - 16 April 2012: Visit by the Zimbabwe Tree Society, including Mark Hyde and Meg Coates Palgrave, to Catapu in Sofala Province, Mozambique, home of the Cheringoma Herbarium. Photographs were taken and specimens were collected and it is expected that these will appear on this site once the specimens have been identified.

29 December 2011 - 1 January 2012: A brief visit by the Zimbabwe Flora team to Gorongosa in Mozambique in order to collect and photograph a new species of Impatiens.

22 September 2011: After 4 months of work by Mark on the site's software, we are pleased to announce that we now have a facility for the three main authors to add information directly to the site online.

We expect this will have 3 hugely beneficial effects:

The site will be continuously updated. Up to now updates have taken place at approximately 2 monthly intervals.
There will be much faster addition of content. Previously, only Mark was able to do this which resulted in a very large backlog of material.
The new content will be highlighted so that the site will be worth visiting on a regular basis.

Other technical changes made:

encoding changed to utf-8;
review and removal of meta tags;
PDO used for connection to the database
upgrade of software version
old checklist pages (versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2) deleted as they are out of date and not consistent with the newer databased versions
spot characters for cultivated plants now handled separately
greater use of includes

As at 22 September 2011, we have 6,437 images for 1,822 species, an increase of 39 species over the May figure, of which 1,803 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

29 May 2011: Preparing the site to upload the May 2011 update. We now have 6,437 images for 1,783 species, an increase of 4 species over the March figure, of which 1,764 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

18 - 26 May 2011: After a quiet period with little content being added to the website, work has now started again. The main activity in the next month or two will be directed at the site's programming.

6 March 2011: Preparing the site to upload the March 2011 update. We now have 6,025 images for 1,779 species, an increase of 15 species over the December figure, of which 1,760 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

5 March 2011: All the site front page stories from December 2009 to date have been added to the archive page.

10 February 2011: Preparing the site to upload the February 2011 update. We now have 5,861 images for 1,764 species, an increase of 35 species over the December figure, of which 1,745 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

Great progress has been made in adding images with 408 new images added to the site.

5 February 2011: Google Custom Search engine added to the search page. This searches both the Mozambique and Zimbabwe flora websites.

4 February 2011: Added links from our individual species pages to the African Plant Database. Shortly we hope to see links back from the APD to our pages. In the process of exchanging data, a number of errors in the spelling of names and authorities and taxonomic changes were detected and these corrections will be made in due course.

26 December 2010: Preparing the site to upload the December 2010 update. We now have 5,453 images for 1,729 species, an increase of 20 species over the October figure, of which 1,710 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

31 October 2010: Preparing the site to upload the October 2010 update. We now have 5,323 images for 1,709 species, an increase of 90 species over the August figure, of which 1,690 are native or naturalised and 19 are purely cultivated.

30 October 2010: Added links from each species page to Jstor Plant Science and Tropicos.

23 October 2010: New location added for Mozambique, the Morumbodzi Falls near Mt Gorongosa.

6 August 2010: Preparing the site to upload the August 2010 update. We now have 5,049 images for 1,619 species, an increase of 81 species over the June figure, of which 1,602 are native or naturalised and 17 are purely cultivated.

13 June 2010: An amendment made to the site search facility so that if a genus name is searched for and found, a list of all the species belonging to that genus is shown. This should enable users to reach particular species more quickly.

6 June 2010: Preparing the site to upload the June 2010 update. We now have images for 1,538 species, an increase of 39 over the April figure.

Other changes have also been made. The ability to plot species records using Google Maps, which has been available on the Zimbabwe site since December 2006, has now been added to the Mozambique site.

For example, see Asplenium mannii and click on the link marked Google Maps.

In fact, all the Google Maps applications, including Earth view, are now available on the Mozambique site.

We have also added a link from each species page to the South African Biodiversity Explorer web site, which describes 'the web of life' in southern Africa. This site has had for a while a number of links to our site.

14 April 2010: Preparing the site to upload the April 2010 update. We now have images for 1,499 species, an increase of 24 over the February figure.

6 February 2010: Preparing the site to upload the February 2010 update. We now have images for 1,475 species, an increase of 63 over the December figure.

14 December 2009: Every record for which there is a latitude/ longitude position can now be plotted individually using Google Maps. See for example the records page of Chironia gratissima. To view the Google map, click on any individual record in the "No." column on the far left. For example record no. 24821. It may be necessary to scroll down to find the map.

13 December 2009: Preparing the site to upload the December 2009 update. The lead story is a selection of images taken by Stefaan Dondeyne. We now have images for 1,412 species, an increase of 46 over the August figure.

13 December 2009: Made corrections to the Mozambican latitude and longitude readings which in some cases were not correct.

17 September 2009: Vernacular names on this Mozambique site limited to English, Portuguese and Sena names. Previously, all the Zimbabwean names were displayed on the site; these are no longer shown.

15 August 2009: Preparing the site to upload the August 2009 update. The lead story is the discovery of Raphidiocystis chrysocoma at Moribane. We now have images for 1,366 species, an increase of 84 over the July figure.

12 July 2009: The July 2009 update of the site, after a gap of 5 months, caused mainly by difficulties in accessing the internet. We now have images for 1,282 species.

2 June 2009: We now have images for 1,082 species.

25 May 2009: On the list of dates page, a facility has been added so that a user can click on a particular date to view the records made on that date.

15 February 2009: Facility added to display all the images for a particular genus. Two links have been added to each genus page; one to photographs of living plants and a separate link to pictures of herbarium specimens. An example of the former is the genus Impatiens, this link gives the living plant images and of the latter, Petra's photos of the herbarium specimens of Gleichenia. (This feature had already been added to the Zimbabwe site on 9 August 2008).

3 February 2009:Preparing the February 2009 version of the site for uploading. At this stage we have images for 935 species.

4 January 2009:Preparing a new version of the site for uploading. At this stage we have images for 858 species.

13 August 2008: Preparing for another upload of the site. 617 species have images.

27 July 2008: Changes and corrections made to the Recently updated species and Recently updated cultivated species pages. The last image for each species is now displayed rather than the first; these tend to be more close-up images and these look better as thumbnails.

25 July 2008: Resuming work on the site after a long break in the UK. Added more detailed information about the content for each family on the List of Families page.

28 May 2008: Preparing for another upload of the site. 596 species have images.

11 May 2008: Work modifying the site so that the images used come from the Zimbabwe flora site. Up to now, there has been rather wasteful duplication of server space. About 400 mb of space will be freed up.

3 May 2008: Three utilities, which list vernacular names by family, genus and species added.

22 Mar 2008: 517 records of ferns, nearly all made by Petra and nearly all from Mt Gorongosa, uploaded to the site. These records include full details of location and altitude and are an enormous addition to the value of the site.

17 Mar 2008: Front page modified to include a picture of the striking and apparently rare legume, Uraria picta.

14 Mar 2008: A new version of the site uploaded today. Currently we have images for 358 species, which represents slow but steady progress.

15 Dec 2007: A new version of the site prepared for upload - after a gap, again, of about 3 months. Currently we have images for 224 species, which represents slow but steady progress.

9 Sep 2007: A new version of the site prepared for upload - the first for about 3 months. Currently we have images for 153 species, all native or naturalised.

19 Jul 2007: The facility to create a checklist for each family has been added to the List of families page. See the column on the right. Clicking on the link produces a list of all the species within a particular family. A further change is that each genus and lower taxon is presented as a link to the main account so that the checklist page is effectively another way of entering the site.

Similarly, a program has been written to create a checklist for each of the cultivated plant families. See the List of cultivated plant families.

26 Jun 2007: Site uploaded and appears to be working well.

24 Jun 2007: Three new utilities written to display the (a) records, (b) collections and (c) images made by a particular person.

For example, take Bart Wursten's page. Follow the records, collections or images links in order to see a detailed list in each case.

23 Jun 2007: Work uploading images.

21 Jun 2007: Work correcting the images problem. Decided not to use the same images on both sites; Mozambican site will have its own images.

19 Jun 2007: First attempt to launch the new site. Unfortunately, it had to be abandoned, because although most of the site worked well,there was a quite significant and puzzling problem namely that no images were being displayed.

13-14 Jun 2007: Both the Zimbabwe and Mozambique flora sites query the same database and share images in a common location. Most of the development work consists of ensuring that each site extracts the data appropriate to that site, without inconsistencies and too much overlap.

Initially, many of the features of the Zimbabwe site (e.g. the maps) will not be available on the Mozambique site, but it is intended to add them at a later stage.

27 May 2007: Further work on the new Mozambican flora site.

21 May 2007: Decision made to create a separate site for the Mozambican flora at its own specific domain.
Work begun on converting the Zimbabwe flora software to also work on the Flora of Mozambique web site. Because of the huge overlap of species between the two countries, I have decided to use the same database for both the Mozambique and Zimbabwe sites.

4-9 Apr 2007: (Easter) Work on a new section of the zimbabweflora site to showcase special plants from Mozambique.

The first three added are Bombax rhodognaphalon, Harrisonia abyssinica and Millettia mossambicensis.