Project Plan and Progress

The project has now been in development for two years, and has made four quarterly releases of software. Each release is designed to implement a significant feature of the software and is accompanied by new data from the content teams.

The first year was spent gathering requirements and producing mock-ups of the project websites based upon ideas gathered from the content teams. We produced two static websites with example data for the genus Arum for the Araceae site, and the genus Acherontia for the Sphingidae website.

Subsequent releases involved a switch over to a database-driven site, enhanced functionality including searching and browsing the data, adding comments to taxon pages, and an LSID resolution service for each website.

We also uploaded genera pages for the Araceae, and an interactive key to the genera, and diagnostic information plus high quality adult and genitalia images for the large genus Xylophanes for the Sphingidae.

This release includes much significant behind-the-scenes work on versioning the data, plus some work on compatibility with the EDIT project's Common Data Model.

On the data side of things, this release includes high quality images of 22 genera including Aellops, Aleuron, Callionima, Hemaris and Nyceryx for the Sphingidae, and species pages for some species in the genera Colocasia, Hapaline, Pothos and Pothoidium for the Araceae.