Acknowledgments
A few people deserve special recognition in the production of this Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora.
First and foremost, Rob Hunter, systems administrator for the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech is responsible for developing the entire system for presenting the data over the internet. With minimal input regarding web page layout from VBA, he made it all work. This effort could not have proceeded without his expertise.
Development of a county-level database for the maps involved assistance from others. Douglas Slotta developed the automated map reader allowing us to scan the hardcopy maps from Edition 3 of Atlas of the Virginia Flora and assign dots to the correct county thus populating an initial database. Dhruv Manek wrote the program allowing us to quickly and easily populate the database with thousands of new records by means of county check boxes for each species. Lara Call Gastinger produced the VBA logo, exercising considerable patience with many requests for minor adjustments. All members of the VBA group were involved in developing plant lists by families and gave many hours of their time discussing and refining the lists. Tom Wieboldt developed the database structure, compiled and maintained the checklist of plants at the herbarium at Virginia Tech, and implemented Douglas Slotta's automated map reader to populate the initial database of county distributions. The numerous new records were added by the VBA group, especially by Ted Bradley. Finally, we would like to thank the Department of Biological Sciences for hosting the site and allowing use of its resources and the time of several employees.
Some years later, at the end of February 2006, the Digital Atlas was moved to a different server at Virginia Tech by Robert Gunter, the current systems administrator for the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. He solicited the help of Nicholas Piasecki, a computer science graduate of Virginia Tech, who noticed a few database inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities. Nicholas re-architected the database, implemented an alternative map generator, and rewrote the Web interface to more closely adhere to standards that have only lately come into practice. (Mainly because he's a nerd and he actually does these sorts of things for fun.)
If you have questions about design or functionality or are experiencing any technical problems, Nicholas would love to hear from you.