Portal:Portals

The portal of portals

Wellcome on the thematic index of Pl@ntUse

This portal ambitions to facilitate access to information and to favor an intuitive navigation. As the difference between a portal and a category is that the former is built manualy, whereas the latter evolves automatically, we privilege here categories. You have to know that every category can contain sub-categories, or be included in a mother-category. For example, a species is included in a genus, and a genus in a family. So don't hesitate to click in categories in order to browse the arborescence!

• To have an idea of the site scope, go to Category:General pages.
• For more technical questions, read the pages at Help:Contents.
• To know about what we are currently working, go to Recent changes.

Certain kinds of pages are now not included in any portal. If you dispose of important data sets, you can propose them, and create a new portal.

Authors portal

As we privilege original sources, we quote numerous authors, and sometimes we reproduce entire books. In both cases, it is necessary to begin with an introduction page about the author, clarifying his bibliography and localizing the versions available on the Internet. The list of such pages is to be found at Category:Author. We also try to classify authors in Chronologies. The anonymous works are found at Category:Book.

Finally, the Category:Digitized book allows to find directly the books reproduced in Pl@ntUse.

Plants portal

The species pages are the site backbone. The aim is ambitious, as more than 50,000 species are used in the world. Our priority is to give terse but precise information for a maximum of species, instead of detailed information on few species. This is why we put links to the best websites we can find. Of course, if you wish to put more information for a given species, you can.

The species which already have a page (more than 9,500) are to be found in Category:Species. You can also access them through the Search window, by typing the beginning of the Latin name or an English name if it is popular. We will progressively put species pages into categories, by genus, then by family and order. This will allow to make more structured searches.

To know which standards we are following in the species pages, go to Help:Structure of a species page.

You can also use the genus pages: Category:Genus. As far as possible, we inventory all the useful species in a given genus, such as Annona, Artemisia, Diospyros, Phaseolus, Rhus, Salvia, Searsia, Smilax, Vernonia, Zanthoxylum and all the Zingiberaceae.

Please note that for the time being, this is done above all in the French version!

To know more, go to the Plants portal.

Uses portal

If you are interested in a particular use group, consult the introduction page to Use groups, and click on the relevant group. To find which plants belong to a given group, go through the Category:Use groups. Be aware that for the moment, these categories are not representative, as few species have been documented.

Names portal

The history and etymology of plant names have always fascinated botanists. They also act as precious clues to follow the migrations of plants and the relations between peoples.

• To consult the lexica and specialized glossaries present in Pl@ntUse, see the Category:Lexicon.
• To know which are the sources and the methods to be used for a given language, see the Category:Language.
• You can also directly consult the Etymological dictionary (available in French by now), which aims to trace the history of names in botanical Latin, French and English by finding primary sources.

Illustrations portal

We endeavour to mobilize in Pl@ntUse historical and botanical illustrations of plants. They allow to testify the presence of a plant in a given place and date, but also to document the evolution of cultivars. Moreover, they are nice to look at.

Most of the illustrations are uploaded in Wikimedia Commons, if it is possible to put them in a CC-BY-SA license, and then imported by a bot into Pl@ntUse. The pages containting whole sets of illustrations are grouped in the Category:Illustrations.