The Muskoka Checklist

This page comprises material from a prospectus forThe Flora of Muskoka by J. P. Goltz and the late R. E. Whiting, together with additional information compiled by staff of the Vascular Plant Herbarium (TRT) in the the Botany Department of the Royal Ontario Museum.

The page is a tribute to R. E. Whiting's wealth of botanical knowledge, and is based on his personal herbarium now housed in TRT, as well as other Muskoka specimens in TRT and other herbaria. The page will eventually become a server for an online database of the vascular flora of Muskoka District that will correspond to the forthcoming print publication of Goltz and Whiting's annotated checklist.

The page was designed by Sian Meikle (University of Toronto Library) and Tim Dickinson (TRT) so as to meet all of the following criteria:

Accurate representation of the taxonomic hierarchy into which Muskoka plants fit.
Ease of use by a wide range of users, from the botanically naive to other botanists.
Rapid loading - the text files are numerous but each one is quite small. Likewise, the decision was made to use only thumbnail sketches of the scanned images of the plants themselves.
Protection the interests of the checklist authors and the ROM, with respect to the future print publication of the checklist, and the copyright of the images. The large number of text files can be accessed efficiently with Web browsers like Netscape or Mosaic. Any of these files can be freely downloaded by the user, yet it would be a major task to download (or print) the entire web version of the checklist. Even if someone rises to this challenge, the graphics so obtained would not compare to those that can appear in the print version (or in other ROM Botany publications in the future!).

Users will be the judge of how successfully these criteria have been met, and of how valid these criteria are for a document like this in the first place. Please use the e-mail addresses in the box at the bottom of each page to give us your feedback on these issues.

The page and the database structure were produced by student participants in the Ontario Environmental Youth Corps "Regional Floras of Ontario" project, in collaboration with staff of TRT and the University of Toronto Library (Credits). They will be maintained and developed further by J. P. Goltz and the staff of TRT.

Muskoka Flora - Index : The Muskoka Checklist

This Information System is provided by the University of Toronto Library.
Please send comments to: timd@rom.on.ca, sian@vax.library.utoronto.ca, pavacic@ecf.utoronto.ca, or batthis@ecf.utoronto.ca.
Last revision: 15 July 1996

Copyright © 1996 Royal Ontario Museum. All rights reserved.
URL = http://library.utoronto.ca/www/muskoka_flora/misc/project.htm