The Plant Distribution application is useful for seeing the statewide distribution of a particular plant. Zoomed close, this application can show line and polygon records of the plant. There is a link to Plant Distribution on each Taxon Report page; as an example, here is Plant Distribution for Acacia dealbata.

The What Grows Here? application (WGH) is useful for searching for all plants in an area. You can also use it to juxtapose the locations of two or more plants on the same map, each with their own colored icon. For instance, here are locations of Centaurea calcitrapa and Centaurea solstitialis in Sonoma Co.

Priority plant lists (eradication and surveillance targets) have been developed for several regions. You can access these plant lists (and the corresponding saved searches) from the Regional Priorities group home page.


Email Alerts
The Regional Priorities group is open to anyone. Once you join the group, you can utilize one of these regional saved searches as an email alert: whenever any new records of the target plants appear in the region, you will be notified by email.

To add an email alert, go to My Calflora / Alerts, select a saved search, and choose whether you want the alert weekly or monthly.

You can also do your own search in Observation Search, save it by name, then go to My Calflora / Alerts add it as an email alert.

In the Calflora model, each data contributor has their own account, and is responsible for their own observation records. The My Observations application allows you to manage and edit your own records.

When several data contributors need to work closely together, they can start or join a group. Groups are explained further on the About Groups page. Groups are a mechanism for collaborating between contributors. If you put your record into a group while it is still unpublished, then the people in that group will be able to see it and comment on it, and people outside the group will not. (Once a record is published, all Calflora users will be able to find it whether is is in a group or not.)

There is also a social aspects of groups: when you add an observation to a group, the other members of the group will likely find out about it, either from an email, by looking at group activity, or by doing a search. Seeing your record may encourage other members to add addional records of their own.

Weed Manager is available to subscribing agencies for an annual fee. Over a dozen agencies across the state are now using Weed Manager.


The Early Detection Network is a Weed Manager group which any Calflora user can join without cost. Members of this group are able to try out some of the features of the Weed Manager system. It has three projects:

• Bay Area: data collection in the Bay Area based on BAEDN's target list.

• Orange County: data collection in Orange County based on this list of emergent invasives from the Orange County CNPS chapter.

• Weed data collection: data collection of early detection target weeds in other parts of the state.

While the Bay Area Early Detection Network (BAEDN) was active, Calflora worked to support their efforts to collect observations of plants on the Bay Area Early Detection Weeds list. How the BAEDN folks came up with their list is fascinating, and is described in detail in this article.

Once the BAEDN list was made public, it had the effect of catalyzing the data collection efforts of many individuals and agencies in the Bay Area. As a result, we know much more now about where those weeds are growing and spreading in Bay Area counties.

For instance, there were 20 records of Rytidosperma penicillatum (purple awned wallaby grass) reported in the Bay Area before June 1, 2011. Since that date, an additional 1150 records have been reported in the Bay Area. As it turned out, this weed is much more widespread than expected, so widespread that it does not really qualify as an early detection target. But, nobody knew how widespread it was before the data collection effort inspired by the BAEDN list.

© 2010 Robert Steers/NPS

"The list of target species for each park was based on current knowledge and rankings, summing recognized invasiveness and biological ease of control and stratifying into priorities by feasibility of control based on species' infested acreage in the park." (pg. xvii)

• To determine the distribution and abundance of target invasive plant species
• To measure the success of removal activities
• To understand how different invasive plants threaten local ecosystems
• To re-prioritize which species and locations to target on future surveys
• To determine the factors that lead to new infestations