Calflora is working with
•  the Bay Area Early Detection Network (BAEDN) and
•  the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC)
to help collect and map weed data across California. These organizations are embarked on an ambitious program of weed data gathering -- follow the links above for more information.

• October 2, 2012: Calflora has contributed 230K non-native plant observations to the Calfornia Department of Fish and Game BIOS Viewer (metadata). The data that appears on BIOS is the result of a long conversation with the folks at BIOS about exactly what fields etc. they wanted to be included. Interestingly, lines and polygons are not included. Each record has a field indicating location quality (relative to the whole dataset) and a field indicating overall record quality (relative to the whole dataset).

• UC Integrated Pest Management (UC Davis) has excellent coverage of agricultural weeds at the Weed Gallery. There are now links to the UC-IPM weed detail pages from each relevant Calflora Taxon Report page -- for instance, Abutilon theophrasti (the link is in Other Sources, bottom right). All weeds covered by UC-IPM are also available as a plant list (or an Illustrated Plant List).

• Cynthia Powell at Cal-IPC uploaded 137,481 observation records during a six month period ending October 12, 2011. First, a number of partner organizations contributed their data using the Metadata Catalog application. Then Cynthia used the Observation Upload application on the contributed data, and when necessary, contacted data contributors to resolve ambiguous taxa or other details. The records are mostly of weeds, but include some native plants and a great deal of shape data -- a huge effort with a huge benefit.

• At the October, 2011 Cal-IPC Symposium at Tahoe City, Cal-IPC demonstrated the beta version of CalWeedMapper (calweedmapper.calflora.org). CalWeedMapper is a quad-level online atlas of wildland weed distribution based on data from various sources including local expert knowledge. Calflora has been working closely with Cal-IPC since 2010 to collect weed observation data for CalWeedMapper.

  If you are working on weeds for a county or weed management area, CalWeedMapper will suggest which weeds are the important targets in your area, and produce documentation that can help secure funding for surveillance, eradication and containment efforts.

Weed Observation Entry
to enter observations one at a time.
2012 February 27: Version 1.53 released, with Google Maps V3. Also, there is a new Number of Plants field, and the range values of Canopy Closure (Percent Cover) have changed.

Observer Smart Phone Application
to make onsite observations with your phone, Android or iPhone.

Photo Upload
to transform photos of plants into observation reports. If a photo is geotagged, the software will pick up the location; otherwise, you can set the location on a map.

My Observations
to review, edit and publish your observations.

Metadata Catalog / GIS Data Upload
to upload GIS datasets (shapefiles, geodatabases, spreadsheets etc.) for assimilation into the database. (Note: this is the simplest way to share your data!)

Observation Upload
to upload an entire dataset directly into the database by copying and pasting, for instance, from a spreadsheet. During the upload process, you assign fields in the dataset being uploaded to fields in the Calflora database. For line and polygon shapefiles, the geometries are stored on the server and associated with your uploaded records.