In 2007, Stuart suggested we send an expensive camera up in a kite. So we did. We had a kite the size of a queen-sized bed that would lift up the dSLR in 3mph winds, a camera with remote control in a picavet suspension, and a distance-marked kitestring. I came up with some ground markers that would allow us to stitch images together and we managed to get the kite going several times. Unfortunately, we never quite got the height we wanted and the kite-surveying idea never really panned out. We got some neat photos though. Find some more info on the Echinacea Field Log
If I were to tackle this again, I'd just get a quadcopter. It was a nightmare trying to get the camera to go where you wanted with the kitestring and you don't have great control. The quadcopter gives you decent stability for a relatively modest price and should be easier to deal with than a kite.
I have been building some maps in R with ggmap. You can see some of the code online
I wrote a little script to parse http gist URLS and clone them as git urls so I don't need to type in a password.
I put together an interactive key using Lucid 3.3, but the experience was not a pleasant one. Their installer was completely broken on Linux even after going back and forth with support. After finally fixing it, I got to experience the software. Not only is the interface confusing, the software is rather slow and seemed prone to crashing. There's also no way to enter in data from a text source, so be prepared to a lot of mousing around. This also makes it impossible to update the key from a database or keep it under and reasonable version control. It's certainly not worth the expensive license.
SAIKS, on the other hand, sucks much less. The data format is kind of a fragile javascript file with the data in a couple big arrays, but it works. I ended up writing a conversion script to go from a CSV format to the JS format with an ugly change to deal with unknowns in our data. This treats missing characters as wildcards, meaning it's possible that identifications will be less precise. Another downside is that if your data are somehow broken, say, some is missing or malformed, there are no useful error messages, even in the JS console. The important thing, however, is that it works, and it actually works pretty well. With some clever scripting and a cron job, you could probably regenerate this from a database if you really wanted.
Check out the original code, my altered code which includes a simple way to include image popups, and my conversion script in the same repository. You can also take a look at the key
I wrote a script to mount up a debian chroot from android, but never really got around to using it due to the lack of a good X server limiting its usefulness. Code's here
You can check out the source code for this site on Github and build it with Poole.