Index of /pub/data-repositories/sepasal

Name                            Last modified      Size  Description
Parent Directory - data/ 2020-09-23 16:28 - medicinal_uses_subset/ 2020-11-24 17:00 - README.txt 2020-10-14 09:48 4.7K sepasal_physical_model.pdf 2020-09-23 15:49 39K sepasal_relational_database.zip 2020-09-23 15:34 52M
README 
======

The Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (SEPASAL) 
is a database and it was an enquiry service about useful wild and semi-domesticated plants 
of tropical and subtropical drylands held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. 

Initiated in 1981 with seed-funding from the Cloth Workers Foundation, 
SEPASAL focused on documenting the uses and use-related properties 
of dryland plants from around the world. 
Information from the botanical, ethno-botanical and anthropological literature was collated, 
evaluated and integrated before dissemination. 
Data was made available via the internet from 1999, by which time SEPASAL 
had established itself as the major source of information on dryland plants. 

Notably, SEPASAL was the first and largest database to implement the Taxonomic Databases 
Working Group Plant Use Standard (Cook FEM (1995). Economic Botany Data Collection Standard. 
Prepared for the International Working Group on Taxonomic Databases for Plant Sciences (TDWG). 
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 146 pp. ISBN 0947643710), 
the development of which relied significantly on input from SEPASAL staff.

SEPASAL is no longer funded, is discontinued as a project, 
and no longer offers an enquiry service. 
The data is now static and available for use here.

The SEPASAL database contains records from 6988 taxa native to 209 different countries. 
It describes 28220 plant uses grouped into 13 categories (117 considering all the sub-uses).
Uses, countries of origin, scientific and vernacular names, as well as taxa descriptors and notes, 
are referenced in a total of 4951 publications.

More specifically, the data includes: scientific name 
(including synonyms) and plant family -as established at the time of data collation-, 
vernacular and trade names, plant description; 
geographical distribution (to country or state level) and status (native or introduced, etc.); 
life cycle and regeneration; uses of plants; 
use-related properties and chemical analysis; 
ecological data including climatic tolerances, 
soil preferences, topography and associated species; physiology; 
cultivation details, pests and diseases; production and seed sources. 
All data are linked to the bibliographic sources from which they were taken.


SEPASAL directory content
=========================

|-- README.txt  This document
|
|-- Database dump  A dump of the original SEPASAL database structure and data
|
|-- Database diagram  Entity-relationship diagram of the original SEPASAL database
|
|-- Data  A directory containing the full SEPASAL data denormalized in CSV files

Data
====

SEPASAL data has been split for ease of access and is grouped conceptually in the following categories: 

- Scientific names.
- Vernacular names.
- Geographical distribution. 
- Descriptors: state / ranges / matrices.
- Uses of taxon: major categories / specific uses.
- Notes.
- Bibliographic sources.

Scientific names refers to all the binomial names, including family and authors in the SEPASAL database, where each taxon is identified by a TaxKey.
Bibliographic sources lists all the publications referenced in the SEPASAL database.

For each category other than bibliographic sources there are two CSV files which contain:

- The category attributes and records linked to the scientific names through TaxKey (for taxa names the attributes are the taxa names).
- The category attributes and records referenced in the literature (with all the references attributes). These files also contain the TaxKey. 

Acknowledgements
===============

SEPASAL's development was funded by The Clothworkers' Foundation and its Internet development was funded by The Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust. Nutritional information on African wild foods was funded by Nestlé Charitable Trust.

Software development and support was implemented at Kew, while data collation, validation and data entry was carried out at Kew, and by staff employed at “nodes” from the following institutions:
- Kenya Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge (KENRIK), National Museums of Kenya (NMK), Nairobi, Kenya (active 2002-2008). 
- National Botanical Research Institute of Namibia (NBRI), Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Rural Development (MAWRD), Windhoek, Namibia (active 2004-2008).

Cite us 
======= 

SEPASAL data are released under the Creative Commons 
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

If you wish to cite information from SEPASAL, please do so in the following format: 
"Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1999). 
Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (SEPASAL) database. 
Published on http://sftp.kew.org/pub/data-repositories/sepasal/  [accessed day, month, year; time]" 

Contact
=======
apps-support@kew.org