Alice Software

Thought to be the most important non-timber forest product in South-East Asia, rattan is valued throughout the region as a source of versatile and flexible cane that has many uses, from tying to basket and furniture making. Economically-important at domestic, national and international levels, recent decades have seen increasing research focus on rattan utilisation, management, cultivation and conservation in Asia, the centre of rattan diversity, and more recently in Africa.

The 600 species of rattans, grouped in 13 genera, are morphologically and ecologically highly diverse. In 1988, recognising the need to document and characterise this diversity, Dr. John Dransfield, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, led efforts to establish a rattan database using the Alice System. Initially using Alice System 1.0, the early rattan database has, over the past decade, been developed into a general palm database with over 1,450 palm taxa (and more than 3,900 scientific names) including some 678 accepted or provisional rattan names with associated nomenclatural, geographical, ecological and utilisation information. All information in the database is linked to a data source. For most information, this data source is bibliographic in nature (book, journal etc.). However, distribution data is more often linked to herbarium sheets which act as accurate vouchers of species range.

More recently, efforts have been made to use the database as tool for rattan species identification. The rattans of Brunei were used as a test data set. These were characterised and scored for over ninety diagnostic, morphological descriptors. The descriptions were entered into an Alice database. Using Alex, the species descriptions were then exported from an Alice database into DELTA format and INTKEY was used to create an interactive identification key. Inspired by the success of the experience with the Brunei data set, efforts are on-going to score characters for rattans for Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, neighbouring parts of China, Burma and Thailand, and Irian Jaya in Indonesia.

Contact John Dransfield, Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB, UK; e-mail j.dransfield@rbgkew.org.uk