Plant website grows into largest picture resource

The website maltawildplants.com has recently received a major update and now lists more than 1,000 plants of which nearly 700 species are illustrated by three to 12 high quality photos each.

This makes the free website the largest ever illustrated publication of flora on the Maltese islands, with some 6,000 photos online so far.

Author Stephen Mifsud, a graduate in agriculture and digital technology, designed the website in 2002. He had focused on ensuring it would be easy for the public to search for a particular plant, increasing awareness and education on the importance and beauty of the local flowering "wild" plants in Malta's fragile countryside.

Mr Mifsud said yesterday that over the last century dozens of native plants have become extinct or very rare due to human interference, mainly because of ignorance. Numerous plants are listed as endangered for several reasons but mostly through human influence such as loss of habitat, pollution of natural water or over-picking of certain delicate plants, such as orchids.

The website, which is visited by 30,000 visitors each month and enjoys a Google page ranking score of 5/10, lists each plant under six indexes - botanical name, English name, Maltese name, botanical index, plant family index and flower colour.

The flower colour index is the easiest way to search for a plant when one does not have much information about it.

Fauna lovers also have their small but steadily growing section with a page containing images and information of mammals, reptiles, insects and marine creatures found in Malta. More than 120 species are illustrated, and more should be inputted by autumn.

Popular pages on this award-winning website include a forum, an interactive tool where one can ask questions, discuss and share information about flora and fauna, a promotion page, a listing of the website's achievements and recommendations, a news page, containing a description of every new update in chronological order and a guestbook, featuring comments left by visitors of the site.

Mr Mifsud said that more work was being carried out to increase the number of illustrated plant species to 800, and the photo archive to 7,000 images.

The public is being given the opportunity to participate by submitting their own photos of plants currently lacking images. Each photo will be credited.

The page is partly sponsored by The Strickland Foundation, Middlesea Insurance plc and the HSBC Cares for the Environment fund. Other sponsors are being sought.

Mr Mifsud said the sponsors, as well as people such as Edwin Lanfranco, Hans Chris Weber, Owen Mifsud, Daniel Farrugia and others who con-tributed with voluntary help and support, kept the page going and improving.

He said he would like to see more government support for this and other environmental projects carried out by private individuals or NGOs.

Future website projects include information on medicinally im-portant wild plants, school educational field trips, illustrative identification keys, and more images of plant species.

All this depends on a number of factors including funding and time, Mr Mifsud said.

www.maltawildplants.com