We have a new tool at Botany One that I’m finding helpful when I come across a species that I’m not familiar with: Species Dashboard.
When I read about a new species there are plenty of places I can look for information. Wikipedia, Plants of the World Online, GBIF and others. That means visiting each site individually, which means remembering which sites to visit, or opening multiple bookmarks and then entering the species name multiple times. What Species Dashboard does is query APIs of various sites, and provide direct links to others.
So, for example, if you were to search for Rosa canina, Species Dashboard will give you an overview from Wikipedia, with a link to the full article, the name and classification from POWO, with a direct link, along with links to IPNI, WFO and Tropicos, links to phylogeny sites, Open Tree of Life and OneZoom, the distribution from GBIF with links there and to BHL, observation data from iNaturalist, and finally recent papers connected to the plant from OpenAlex, with a link to Google Scholar if you’d like to use that.
I find it useful, but I haven’t bookmarked it, because there’s a better way to use it. That’s using a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a small snippet of Javascript code that you can put in your bookmark bar that can interact with page content.
This is a bit fiddly, but for good reasons. A dodgy bookmarklet can cause serious harm, so you should never install a bookmarklet you can’t read. Even one I write. So the instructions to install are the long way of doing it, but you can see what’s being done.
First drag the URL of any page to the bookmark bar. Then edit the name so it reads “Species Dashboard” or even just “SD”. Then edit the address so that it reads:
javascript:void(window.open('https://www.botany.one/species-dashboard/?species='+encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection().toString())))This needs to be pasted all at once as a very long address line. What this does is tell the browser to grab the text you select. This will work best if you’re highlighting a species name. It encodes that selection and then adds https://www.botany.one/species-dashboard/?species= to the front to make a URL. It then opens that URL in a new tab, or possibly window. So, with the bookmarklet, you should now be able to highlight a species name, press a button and open a page with basic information about that species.
It’s set up for plants. It works less well for birds or fish, because they don’t appear in sites like IPNI or POWO, but it will still grab data from the other sites.
Cover image: Erythronium albidum by Lauren Markovich / iNaturalist CC BY-NC
