Acknowledgments
Although conceived and developed by VBA, the Digital Atlas has benefited greatly from financial assistance from the Flora of Virginia Project over the years. Since going online in 2005, the Digital Atlas has been through several iterations involving the assistance of numerous individuals. Beginning with the 3rd edition of Atlas of the Virginia Flora, Douglas Slotta and Dhruv Manek provided computer expertise and were instrumental in developing a database of county records by creating an automated map reader and a check-box system for managing records, respectively. Flora of Virginia illustrator, Lara Call Gastinger, produced the VBA logo. Rob Hunter got the website up and running on the Department of Biological Sciences servers. We especially thank the Department of Biological Sciences for hosting the site for 7 years, and its IT support personnel, Rob Gunter, for helping with numerous tasks over the years. Nick Piasecki re-architected the site in 2006 to take care of database inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities. The Flora of Virginia Project prepared and contributed the first several sets of photographs for quick uploading to the website. VBA worked diligently to compile a more accurate representation of the flora and its distribution by counties. Tom Wieboldt acted as site administrator keeping the distributions up-to-date and adding new information coming in from a wide variety of sources.
In October 2011, with the assistance of RYP Marketing, Inc., the Digital Atlas was moved to a public hosting site in order to more efficiently manage the site and add some new functionality. We thank Zack Thompson and his team at RYP Marketing for ably accomplishing this, and especially Nathan Francis, Project Manager, for keeping things moving and attending to every detail. While the Digital Atlas website looks much the same, RYP Marketing’s work will greatly help VBA spread the workload as well as make the data more accessible to the botanical community.