Title: Australian weed identification tool now available on-line
The Lucid team at the University of Queensland – now based in the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI) – have been involved in the development of weed identification tools for the past 10 years. Recently, the key to Environmental Weeds of Australia, which has previously been distributed as a DVD version and available from http://shop.cbit.uq.edu.au/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=189, has now been made available online, courtesy of Biosecurity Queensland. This key is freely available at http://www.business.qld.gov.au/agriculture/land-management/weed-identification-tool.html.
The Lucid team have recently been involved in contributing to another weed key through a collaborative BioNET-EAFRINET project in East Africa to develop identification tools for invasive weeds, insect pests of maize and bee pollinators. Since the vast majority of important invasive weeds in East Africa are already covered by the Australian weed key, the score database and fact sheets for almost 100 weed species were made available to colleagues in East Africa, enabling them to modify the key and edit the fact sheets in Fact Sheet Fusion to make them relevant to East Africa. This key can be accessed at http://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/plants.htm. A similar exercise was carried out with colleagues in New Zealand a few years ago. Anyone interested in using the Lucid weed key database to produce weed keys tailored to their own situation should contact Greg Blackburn – G.Blackburn@uq.edu.au
Article: WeedsNews2940 (permalink) Date: 21 February 2012; 7:48:21 PM AEDT