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Who are we?
Where does our idea come from to publish a plant database on the Internet?
What are our goals?
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
that we spend more time out there in the field searching for "our" plants than most of the
real botanists with university background.
We are Julia Etter (Swiss), a German scholar and Martin Kristen
(Austrian), a computer scientist, who turned their hobby into
their profession. Since 1997 we're on the road only with short breaks (please also see
our private website www.globetrotters.ch!). We are traveling to
find and photographically document the plants of the Agavaceae (century plants
and other related plants - see our other data base website under www.agavaceae.com!) and the American Crassulaceae (stone crops -
this website) families in nature.
Many things have change since 1997. We have since published many articles and our photos have
appeared in various books. Since 2009 we also work together with the national university of Mexico
(UNAM or Universidad Autónoma de México). This allowed us to win over some valuable
contributors for photos and more information.
2. Where does our idea come from to publish a plant data base on the
Internet?
 For us as laypersons, it was difficult to find
useful material about the above-mentioned plant families 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 is one of our more serious hobbies, we started to document plants
in culture, but in the end that was not satisfying enough anymore because plants in culture often tend to look quite
different from the ones growing in nature.
 It can be very difficult for a layperson
to have access to information like first descriptions and good color photographs, we decided
to assemble the data we collect and a part of our pictures into an electronic data base and
to publish it on the Internet - to make this information accessible to the public. We would like to emphasize that this website is private and that we don't pursue any commercial goals. The access is still free and open to everyone.
Nevertheless we ask you not to abuse this data (or the pictures)
for your own private or commercial projects (read the copyright section under "database -
important usage hints"!)
3. What are our goals?
Our goal is to give an overview, as far as ever possible, over the
plants of the American Agavaceae family in words and pictures. 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 complete
and correct from the beginning on. Names and classifications change and until we hear
about this time goes by. Many pictures and descriptions in the data base are
unfortunately still 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.
The goal of our efforts, however, is to complete this data base in the course of time.
Of course we're always 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"!
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
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