#bplant.org

[cazort]

Ecoregion-Based Plant Lists and Search

We have published plant lists for each ecoregion, and added the ability to search for plants within a region.

I’m super excited about this!

There is a big native plant movement nowadays, and people are starting to understand the importance of planting native plants to support native insects and thus support the food web and protect ecosystems.

But unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t planting plants native to their locality. People might plant species native to their country, or better, their state, but just because something is native to your state doesn’t mean it is native to your particular area.

Political boundaries do not correspond well to ecological boundaries, which is where my site comes in!

I have published plant lists for specific ecoregions. North America is divided into 182 level 3 ecoregions, 84 of which intersect the continental US. For these 84 regions I have published plant lists of native plants AND lists of all plants, showing the plant’s status (native, introduced, expanded, extirpated, etc.) in the region. You can also do in-region searches!

Please share this with anyone you know who does gardening, landscaping, or ecological restoration! I hope people find this useful and that it helps people to make more ecologically-sound choices!

[bplant-org]

We interlinked with another website, Maryland Biodiversity Project (MBP), which tracks not only plants but all living organisms in the state of Maryland. What this means is that, where records exist, the plant pages (2,949 have been linked up) on our site now link to the corresponding pages on MBP. We still have 285 unmatched records which require manual review (such as because the scientific names don't match, which is common when plants classified differently by different authorities.)

MBP is super significant for two reasons. Not only is it the most valuable resources for researching plants in the state of Maryland, but it addresses a hole or weak point in the data on plant distribution.

The main two sources people use when researching plant distribution in the US are the USDA PLANTS database, and BONAP, which is a non-profit that has expanded on and improved the USDA PLANTS data. Both of these sites have county-level data for most of the entire lower 48 states. However, for some reason, Maryland lacked such data. BONAP had been gradually improving on this, and had made significant progress, but since BONAP covers the whole US, it still had quite a few instances of missing data.

MBP is super thorough, filling in extensive gaps and giving unparallelled, comprehensive coverage for the entire state.

We give the example below of a specific plant: American Burnweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius), which is a common weedy plant that is native and ecologically beneficial. This species had extensive missing data in the USDA, and still some missing data in BONAP, but it actually occurs in all counties of Maryland as reported by MBP (anyone in Maryland can check this, it's a common plant and you can find it just about anywhere!)

Especially if you live in Maryland, check out MBP! It is a very cool project and covers a lot more than just plants.

[cazort]

New Databases Linked: Flora of North America & NatureServe Explorer

An explanation of how to best utilize Flora of North America and NatureServe Explorer, the two newest linked sites.

I'm excited about interlinking bplant.org with FNA and NSE. If you don't know about these resources, you might enjoy the explanations of their relative strengths and limitations, especially as plants are concerned.

FNA covers all plants of North America north of Mexico, and focuses on plant morphology, identification, and keys, whereas NSE covers not only plants but all species worldwide, and focuses on conservation issues.

[cazort]

Ecoregions of Virginia

Virginia spans 27 ecoregions, from the coastal plain through the Piedmont and much of the Appalachian mountains.

Today I finished my last article of the 27 ecoregions of Virginia. They’re now all complete! (The entire northeast too is already complete, I’ve been moving south and west gradually.)

If you visit the website, you’ll find a clickable, interactive version of this map.

Why is this stuff important?

Because political borders, like state, country, and county, do not correspond well to ecological factors like geology, climate, vegetation cover, and land use.

Learning about ecoregions and learning to list or study plant and animal species by ecoregion rather than by state, helps you to better understand ecosystems.

Also, this site is important because it takes a lot of data that has been published, but not in the most accessible or user-friendly format, and makes it easily accessible to a wide population. The more people learn about this stuff, the closer we will be to protecting the unique plants and animals and ecosystems that are found in each of these regions!

Please check it out and please reshare the material from this site so it can reach others! This site is a huge project and passion of mine and I have been doing it almost singlehandedly for well over a year now and I am really proud of what I’ve created so far!

[cazort]

We Are Now Accepting Donations

bplant.org is now accepting donations through Liberapay. This post addresses frequently asked questions.

Hey everyone interested in plants, ecology, and protecting the environment!

bplant.org is a project I’ve been working on for over a year, and it’s been launched since January. In that short time I’ve achieved the following milestones:

Interactive ecoregion maps of all of North America, including maps of the ecoregions of all lower 48 U.S. states.

Written 234 ecoregion articles, covering all the Level I and II ecoregions of North America and covering all the Level III and IV ones for PA, DE, MD, OH, NY, MA, CT, RI, VT, and NH.

Constructed tentative range maps of most (over 5600) plants native to North America - see the full explanation here.

Almost no downtime (total of a few minutes in the past year), contrasting with the USDA PLANTS database and BONAP, both of which have been down for hours, and sometimes days at a time.

Begun testing interactive features for user-reported plant observations, which you can find on the homepage

Begun completing articles on individual plants; 250+ have some content and under-construction articles, 13 have been more-or-less completed, and there are 6000+ stub articles, many also have photos.

I’ve done this with zero funding, working on this as a side project while supporting myself through other income

I am raising money so I can keep doing this, pay myself, and potentially hire others. If I get more money, I can put more time into this project. You can be certain that giving to this will be an efficient use of your money because you can see for yourself what I’ve achieved in the past year.

The blog post I link to addresses some frequently asked questions about the donations.

Please share this post, and please consider donating to this project if you are able! If you can’t donate yourself, consider asking plant- and environment-oriented friends or family to donate too!

You can donate here, through Liberapay! Liberapay is a donation platform that does not charge fees on top of payment processing for credit cards or paypal.

Thank you!

[cazort]

How We Handle Wild vs Cultivated Plants - bplant.org

An explanation of how and why we handle reporting of wild vs. cultivated plants, by breaking them into two fields for organism type and origin.

I’m really excited about this post. For those of you who don’t know, bplant.org is a website that I’ve been developing. It’s a super ambitious project, a little bit like eBird or iNaturalist, but focusing on plants.

Whenever I undertake a big project like this, people often start asking me: “How is this different from (such-and-such existing website or app)?” And a big one of these is iNaturalist.

Aside from the obvious answer that bplant.org focuses on plants and doesn’t try to cover all types of living organisms, there are some ways that I hope bplant.org can address some of the problems or shortcomings with how iNaturalist handles or supports data.

iNaturalist is supposed to be for reporting “wild” organisms. But...for one, they don’t define what exactly it means to be wild. For two, they don’t explain how to deal with “border” cases of organisms where it’s not immediately clear whether  it is wild or cultivated. And for three, they assume all records wild by default, and they rely on a “data quality assessment”, that in practice people rarely use, for flagging things that aren’t actually wild, and then excluding them from their data.

This causes several problems and makes the data less useful for science and conservation purposes.

I think we’ve come up with a pretty elegant way of handling this on bplant.org. We break the concept of “willdness” into two separate categories: the plant’s characteristics (wild type vs. cultivar), and the plant’s origin (a volunteer or wild-seeded plant, one seeded by humans, or one planted by humans). There are also intermediate and unknown categories. And...perhaps more importantly, (a) records are marked unspecified by default (b) the fields are displayed prominently so everyone is encouraged to click them (c) there is online help documentation explaining exactly what the categories mean and how to use them.

I’m hoping that people who read this can see that bplant.org has something unique and worthwhile to offer to the landscape of citizen science websites!

If you are into this stuff, please check out this post and consider sharing it, and also, please check out bplant.org! I only launched it very recently and I am looking both to gain visibility for it, and continue getting feedback from people about the direction you want to see it go in!