Systematising knowledge about useful plants
Padiush began from an uncomfortable observation: much of the ethnobotanical knowledge documented in the field ends up scattered across notebooks, spreadsheets and files nobody opens again.
The problem is rarely a shortage of data. It is that the path from interview to publishable result is full of manual transcription, names that do not match and calculations redone by hand. Every one of those steps loses information and adds errors.
We built Padiush so that path is a single one. What gets recorded in front of the interviewee is the same thing that feeds the species catalog, the indices and the final export, with no intermediate spreadsheet.
We work from El Salvador, in Spanish first, because most tools in this field are designed in English and for other contexts.
Padiush is free software. You can read the code that handles your informants’ data, run your own instance, or adapt it to your study: Free software · source code.
How we work
Method before features
Every index we implement has a documented formula, a bibliographic source and a verified worked example. If we cannot cite it, we do not calculate it.
Provenance is never lost
The name the interviewee used, the source a taxon came from and the value before a correction are all kept. Data has to be auditable.
Consent belongs to the study
Whoever leads the research decides what gets recorded and answers for consent. We process that information on their instructions, not our own.
