In July 2004, I was contacted by a French graphics art designer - Jean Michel Istre for using one of my photos in the photogallery of Borage officinalis (Common borage) for promotional graphic design of leaflets and presentation documents for a French laboratory called Thea Laboratories. They were exposing a medicine which amongst others, it uses extracts from Borago officinalis herb. A contract was defined between Mr. Istre and myself for copyright issuing and conditions. The contract and design can be seen by clicking the thumbnails in the table below. This is a clear indication that the photos on the site are of high quality level to be used in promotional artwork.

Illustration of the design. The flower on the right is taken from this site.	Contract regarding copyright issues and conditions.	Brochure about Thea Labs (France).

About Spring 2004, I was contacted by author and botanist Ingmar Gorissen to use a photo from the photogallery of Erica multiflora and publish it in a book called "Dwarf shrub heaths of Europe - from Atlantic to Caucasus and Ural". The book is bilingual (English/German), and contains 180 pages of A4 pages full of colourful illustrations and detailed information. The quality of the book is superb and nicely presented and laid out. I am very pleased that one of the photos in this excellent book is mine. Look at sample pages of the book in the table below.

Title cover of the book.	Description of the book by the author himself.	Index of the book.
Sample of the book where there is my photo of Erica multiflora.	Sample of another page of the book.	Photo Index and Acknowledgment of my small contribution in the book.

In August 2004, I was contacted by an Australian author from the Centre for Biological Information Technology (CBIT) named Sheldon Navie who asked me for permission to use some photos of Diplotxis erucoides and Hypericum triquetrifolium from maltawildplants.com. I granted permission, given that relevant credits are given for my photographs.


The CD was released in early Autumn 2004 of which I received one in November. The CD is comprehensive, easy to follow and contains many photos. There are about 980 plants listed and described as declared or noxious plants. The idea of the CD is that from the physical characteristics of a plant encountered in wild, one can identify it by entering its basic physical features. The plants that not have those features are eliminated from the list, and this goes on until one arrives to the individual plant or few plants that makes recognition easy assisted by the supplied photos. Very well thought and a modern type of interactive botanical education. It is also easy and fun to use. Samples and screenshots of the program can be seen below.

Title cover of the CD case.	Title cover of the CD disk.	Description of the product by the author.
Screenshot of the program: Main Menu .	Screenshot of the program: Main program to identify individual plant by selecting various keys (features) of the plant under examination.	Screenshot of the program: Layout of the fact-sheet page. This shows the fact sheet of Hypericum triquetrifolium were all photos for this plant were taken from www.maltawildplants.com.
Screenshot of the program: Nomenclature and general description of the plant.	Screenshot of the program: Similar species to the plant.	Screenshot of the program: Index of species names sorted out in alphabetical order.
	-	-
Screenshot of the program: Acknowledgment list, including my website for giving some photos for this project.	-	-

In mid November 2005, Jacqueline Vanhear, a teacher at St.Joseph School Paola, and also co-ordinator of the EkoSkola programme and Birdlife activities made contact with me in order to gain permission to use photos and material from my website for an Educational and Environmental Project known as the EkoSkola. Permission was granted given the website is mentioned somewhere.

Large part of the work was carried out by children themselves with assistance of Jacqueline. This was presented as a large noticeboard in the school for everyone to see and read. The aim of these noticeboards is to disseminate information about wildlife in Malta and to arouse an environmental responsible consciousness in our children. Photos of the notice board can be seen below and supplied by Jacqueline herself via email.


It was very nice to read a subsequent email from Jacqueline telling that their school had just officially been awarded the most prestigious Green Flag Award after so much hard work and actually they were the first school to bring this award to Malta.


Congratulations also from the Maltawildplants.com management

Snapshot of the Ekoskola Noticeboard (1).	Snapshot of the Ekoskola Noticeboard (2).	Snapshot of the Ekoskola Noticeboard (3).

My hard work, determination and effort that I put in creating and updating the site have resulted in winning an INTERNATIONAL AWARD granted by Actualidad 21st century, an award giving company leader in publishing, websites and other promotions.

The award was given to my FULL website www.marz-kreations.com, (under my company name - MarZ Kreations) where the wild plants website is a section of it. I am very proud and glad about this award because I need some motivation boost every now and then about my dedicated work on the Maltese flora. Sometimes I feel that this work is not appreciated by local authorities.

Certificate for the Actualidad International Award granted to my website.

This is a recommendation letter by Edwin Lanfranco, lecturer at the University of Malta and experienced local botanist about the MaltaWildplants.com project.

Recommendation letter by local botanist Edwin Lanfranco.

In May 2006, Editor Ruth Haytrust have written to me an email to ask permission to use one of my photos in the journal called Urbio (Urban biodiversity and human nature) published by English Nature. The photo was used for an article about 'plants that changes places' as seen in the pic below. The article was published in Summer 2006 as Issue 12. If you want to subscribe and order this and other issues of this journal, you can have a look at the publishing company site - www.nature-english.org.uk. Greetings to Ruth from Malta.

Front Page of the Urbio magazine (Issue 12).	Article page with photo of Carpenter Bee on Acanthus mollis.	Photo given by maltawildplants.com for the publication.

This is a recommendation letter by Prof. Chris Hans Weber, Professor of Botany at the University of Marburg, about the MaltaWildplants.com project.

Click on thumbnail to read the recommendation letter by Prof. Chris Hans Weber.

This is a recommendation letter written by Dr. Elena Yasnetskaya, adviser at the National Plant Biotechnology Centre about the MaltaWildplants.com project.

Click on thumbnail to read the recommendation letter by Dr. Elena Yasnetskaya.

This is a recommendation letter by Mr. Joseph Degiovanni, Head of the Biology Department of the Junior College (part of the University of Malta), about the MaltaWildplants.com project. These comments where taken from the Visitors Comments Page (click here) where visitors can submit their comments via the online form. All comments received are logged by the User IP.

Click on thumbnail to read the recommendation letter by Mr. Joseph Degiovanni.

Some of the most important comments received about the project from various visitors both locally and around the world. Click on thumbnails to view a large preview and read the corresponding comments.

Comments from botanists	Comments from foreign experts	Comments from Tourists
Comments from students	Comments from local citizens 1	Comments from local citizens 2
		READ ALL COMMENTS
Comments from persons who used Maltawildplants.com as a research tool (pg1)	Comments from persons who used Maltawildplants.com as a research tool (pg2)	All comments

Several thousands of readers of the Times of Malta, (the most selling newspaper on the islands) could read a full colour-page article about the research project about Maltese Flora. The sponsors where mentioned black on white in the article. The article was written by Rosanne Zammit. Another article about the website was previously published on the Sunday Times of Malta on the last Sunday of November.

Click image above to read the whole article. (.mht file - wait 30seconds for loading)

The Grip is a colour and high quality magazines produced by WaterMelon Productions for Malta International Airport which it hands out for free to tourists visiting the airport. Some 40,000 copies are handed out. A small advert/article was published on the July/August issue and again the sponsors were shown.

The article on the Grip.	Front Cover of the GRIP magazine

The book called "Nature in Gozo" by John J. Borg, Edwin Lanfranco and Joe Sultana which launched on the 9th of October 2007 is composed of 3 categories:

    1) The ecology and habitats of Gozo.
    2) The Flora Section.
    3) The Fauna Section.


The Flora section (wild plants) contains 27 photographs taken by myself, many of which are rare to very rare plant species like Silene fruticosa, Asparagus stipularis, Echium sabulicula or endemic species like Ophrys melitensis, Zannichellia melitensis and Alium melitense. The name of the website is shown next to each photograph as well in the preface of the book. Thus the thousands of readers of the book will soon or later visit the website for those extra details and macro photos that a book cannot feature.

Below are large previews of the book and the look-launching ceremony.

Front Cover of the Book	Sample showing the description pages. At the bottom right corner, there is the list of photographers of the corresponding photos on the adjacent page.	Sample showing the photo pages
Book-launching ceremony with important guests like Guide Lanfranco, Joe Sultana, Edwin Lanfranco, John J. Borg, Joseph Mangion, and Hon. George Pullicino.		Slides from the presentation of the book - Maltawildplants.com is one of the main sources of photography of the book.

The Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. It is a range from 0-10 where the higher it gets the better the website is on the internet. I am very pleased to inform you that MaltaWildplants.com have a page rank 5. From 1.6 million websites in the world, only 21,000 c. are currently ranked as PR5. To understand better how prestigious this Page Ranking is, we can compare this value of other popular multi-funded websites in Malta:


Gov.mt: PR7
Mepa Website: PR6
BOV: PR6
HSBC Malta: PR5
DI-VE: PR5
Vodafone Malta: PR5
MiddleSea: PR5
GozoChannel: PR5
FrankSalt Estates: PR4
Ekoskola Malta: PR3
By now there are nearly 20 sites in the whole world having page rank 10 !!!


To check the PR of a website one can input it in the PR checker tool [ Click here or here ] . To learn more about PR and its relevance to advertisement - [ Check here ]

Snapshot of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) website with PageRanking (PR) checker stating that on 6th Dec 2007, only 21,000 websites are ranked as PR5 from the total of 1.62million websites in the world.	Snapshot of a SEO website stating that MaltaWildPlants.com is ranked PR5 from a scale of 0 to 10!!!	Snapshot of another SEO website stating that MaltaWildPlants.com PR is 5!!!

The author of this website, Stephen Mifsud, have found 2 new species of plants that was not recorded during the last 180 years or so that the flora of the Maltese islands was studied scientifically. The plants consists of the Grass - Dactyloctenium aegyptium and the Amaranth - Amaranthus muricatus. The former is only found in few stations in Europe, only in Italy (incl. Sicily), Crete and possibly Spain. This research which involves a large amount of time, is co-sponsored by MiddleSea (2007), Strickland Foundation and HSBC (2008). Click the link below to read the full article.

Snapshot from the Article published on The Times of Malta		Read the Online article (.mht file, may take a while to load and always click ignore to script errors)

Below you find a table of what are known as "Web statistics" which basically show values representing how many times the website has been accessed and the size of data that has been download. These values are generated by the server of the host company. The most important value is the average visits per month which last June was another record of a stunning 40,078 visitors per month ! July also had the same traffic in terms of visitors per month but more data was downloaded. The average is around 26,000 visitors per month and as shown circa 350,000 visitors per year.

Web statistics of the website.