Who are we?
Where does our idea come from to publish a plant database on the Internet?
What are our goals with this?
Many questions... here are the answers!

1. Who are we?

Academic botanists call us hobby-botanists (sometimes with a pejorative undertone), but we think that we take our hobby more than seriously. In any case, we are sure to spend more time out there in the field, means searching for "our" plants, than most of the real botanists.

We are Julia Etter (Swiss), a German scholar and Martin Kristen (Austrian), a computer scientist, who turned their hobby voluntarily (and thus love it!) into their profession. Since November 1997 we're on the road only with short breaks (please see also our private website under www.globetrotters.ch!). We're traveling in the field to find and photographically document the plants of the American Crassulaceae (stone crops and other related plants - this website) and the Agavaceae (century plants - see our other database website under www.agavaceae.com!) families at their natural locations. Sometimes we even stumble over plants not yet known to scientists and that's what makes this search even more thrilling.

2. Where does our idea come from to publish a plant data base on the Internet?

Everything started very harmlessly in the year 1990 with a small collection of Crassulaceae plants which we really liked because of their often perfect rosette shape. The collection grew daily and with the time we added many Crassulaceae plants. We could't find (for us as laypersons) much useful material in the scientific literature. Especially the pictures left a great deal to be desired since you have to be satisfied with black and white photographs or the picture of a dried herbarium specimen. Since photography also was one of our more serious hobbies, we first started to document the plants in our own collection completely and in high color picture quality. Finally that was not satisfying enough for us since plants in culture tend to look (unfortunately!) quite different from the ones growing at the natural location. Besides, we really wanted to know more about "our" plants. Is there any better way to learn more about plants than to visit them where they originally come from ?

After a little test trip to the paradise of succulents in Mexico in 1995, we decided without more ado to visit and document all our favorite plants in the field, at their natural location. To make our unlimited botanical expedition a little bit more practical (and also because of our bad experiences with Mexican accomodations), we had an expedition vehicle custom-built suiting our special needs. A little home on wheels in which we could spend the night wherever we wanted to wait for better light conditions to take pictures. From the beginning of our expedition on we kept up with the tremendously fast development of the digital photography. The quantities of data and pictures about "our" plant families is growing tremendously on a dialy base. Many people who have seen some of our pictures asked us why we did't publish any book yet with all this material. However, at the moment we still think that we don't have enough material to realize such a project.

Since we know that there is no such comparable project worldwide, and that it's very hard for a layperson to gain access to all this data, we decided to put together the data we collect and a part of our pictures we shoot every day (these pictures here clearly show you that serious photography can be associated with a lot of work) into an electronic data base and to publish it on the Internet - to make all this information accessible to the public. We would like to emphasize that this website is totally private and that we don't pursue any commercial goals. The access is for free and open to everyone. Nevertheless we ask you not to abuse these data (and of course especially our pictures) for your own private or commercial projects (read the copyright section under "database - important usage hints"!)

3. What are our goals with this?

Our primary goal is to give an overview (as far as ever possible) over the plants of the American Crassulaceae family in words and pictures. Easily understandable for the layperson, added with our own experiences from the location, provided with references to further reading and - for the more interested of you - completed with the original description from the scientific literature. Provided that we have access to one of those texts, we will scan it and make it accessible via a mouse click to the user of our data base (the legal rights stay of course with the respective holder of the copyright!).

Step by step we want to continue our documentation and add new data as best we can. We ask for your patience and understanding that such a data base cannot be totally complete and correct from the beginning on. Names and classifications change and until we hear about this on our trip time goes by. Many pictures and descriptions in the database are unfortunately still totally missing, others are not yet finished. Many times it's hard to be at the right spot at the right time. This is especially true with flowering plants. Although we try very hard to visit the plants while flowering, this isn't always possible, particularly when traveling according to the season. It's good advice to avoid the rainy season when roads and tracks often get totally impassable - especially in Mexico. The goal of our efforts, however, is to complete this data base in the course of time.

This is the point where we like to say that we would be very happy to get every help other hobby-botanists can offer (of course, academic scientists are not excluded from this but normally they don't have the time for such a project). If you're interested in helping, please have a look at the link "contributors"!

4. Structure of this website

We tried to design this website as easy to use and user-friendly as possible. If you have any comments, critics, remarks or other useful hints please write us an e-mail (you can find the corresponding links everywhere on our pages - but you can also click here).

The section "introduction" (this page) tells you a little bit about us and why we created this website.

In section "contributors" we present our contributing members in word and picture. There is also a little passage at the end of that page where you can read all about what it takes to contribute to this website.

The page in section "news" shows you the latest additions to this website.

Under "database" you will find all the data we collected about the plants of the Crassulaceae family. In principle, the data are stored under their scientifc names, containing a complete synonymy. If you click on a name which is a synonym of another plant name today, you will be re-routed automatically to the currently correct name within the corresponding genus. If you're looking throughout the familiy for a name, the search function will quickly bring the desired result. All the small pictures can be enlarged with a mouse click. All the yellow shining first descriptions and other literature can be read via mouse click too. You can switch to further operating instruction hints on the main page of each database section.

The section "links" leads you to other websites related to plants or ourselves.

With the function "preferences" you can influence the website according to your needs. in a certain way. You can switch on and off the main function set and you can choose which parts of the database window should be displayed.

The function "deutsch" lets you switch from the English to the German version. At first we switch the language of this website to the language of your browser. After switching over to another language it will be kept until you delete your cookies, until you have previously installed your operating system again or until you changed your computer system.

Have a good time now and enjoy browsing our website! We hope to hear from some of you, and we can probably win some new contributors too!

The editors and designers of this website
Julia Etter & Martin Kristen