Introducing Sepal
Hi there! Welcome to the first post of the Sepal blog. Sepal is a new-ish plant collection manager for botanic gardens, arboreta, herbaria and anyone who manages plant collections. It was built to bring order and joy to your plant collection.
I say new-ish because Sepal’s story started over twenty years ago. In 2005 I was working at Belize Botanic Gardens (BBG) and managing their plant collections using a spreadsheet that I had to copy to a floppy disk to move between the computer I worked on and the computer connected to the label printer. It was tedious work.
At that point I had a degree in computer science, a short career in tech and experience with open-source software. There also weren’t a lot of options in the early 2000s for plant collection management software, especially so for botanic gardens with very limited budgets. That was when I created Bauble. Over time, and with some funding through the UBC Botanic Garden, Bauble eventually became a relatively feature-complete desktop application for managing plant collections. It was free and open-source and even a few other gardens in the world adopted it for their plant collection.
Fast forward to about 2011 and I had left BBG, had a new job and a new baby and much less time to allocate to Bauble. Fortunately, development was taken over by Mario Frasca, and he eventually forked Bauble into what became Ghini.
I never stopped thinking about Bauble and collection management software and toyed around with several different ideas over the years. The collection management software landscape also changed quite a bit since 2011 with more choices in apps and more open data and online services to help with taxon names, conservation status, etc. Still, there seemed to be a real gap that wasn’t being filled for gardens that needed a low cost, simple to run, feature-complete, free and open-source plant collection management app. It was from here that Sepal was born.
What makes Sepal different?
Sepal is designed to be a cost-effective app for managing your plant collections without compromises. Aside from what you would expect from any other similar applications, there are things that make Sepal different:
- It’s open source so that your invaluable plant records are never locked into a proprietary platform. The code can be found on our GitHub page.
- It can be self-hosted for free so you don’t need to pay someone a monthly subscription to run Sepal.
- It’s simple to run and doesn’t require a separate database service. Our goal is to eventually make Sepal as easy to install as any other application on your computer.
- In addition to managing your plant collection it also helps manager your media collection and integrates with third-party services like the IUCN Red List, World Flora Online Plant List, BGCI’s PlantSearch, etc.
We’ll also be launching Sepal Cloud, which will be a cost-effective solution for paying us to host Sepal for you. More to come about that in our next blog post.
So welcome to Sepal and stay tuned. You’re gonna love some of our upcoming features and the joy that Sepal brings to your plant collection.
Kind regards,
Brett Adams
CEO of Sepal, LLC