Vision

Calflora foresees emerging and growing needs for information related to locally focused planning, education, and conservation.  The decades ahead will be a period of rapid change for California wild communities: increasing incidence of invasive species and pathogens, climate change, environmental changes associated with human population growth; all mean rapid changes in species distributions and conservation status.

Calflora will serve the need for rapid information exchange occasioned by this dynamic picture. We want to put major effort into addressing these requirements while maintaining our current strength as a library for California plant information provided by major institutional collaborators. Calflora's user community represents a broad range of expertise and has a large capacity for volunteer involvement. We plan to dramatically increase the role of volunteers in all aspects of various program developments.

Habitat Planning, Restoration and Monitoring

We will be focusing efforts on further developing tools to facilitate the participation of government agencies, environmental organizations and citizen in building data resources that are relevant to habitat restoration and conservation planning. We will refine existing and develop new online tools that allow users to submit data and images, review and annotate information, and use Calflora's online infrastructure for data exchange within and among local working groups. Calflora volunteers have tremendous interest in developing new data resources for restorationists and native plant gardeners. Expanding Calflora applications in this area will coordinate well with improving resources and tools for locally focused planning applications. Habitat Conservation Plans and Natural Community Conservation Plans, county planning, urban creeks councils, Weed Management Areas, watershed councils, bioregional planning groups are examples of these kinds of efforts and user communities.

Education and Citizen Involvement

Active participation is key to effective teaching both inside and outside the classroom. In collaboration with partners, we will be developing new interfaces that bring Calflora data and images into K-12 science curricula and make good use of Calflora's data submission capacity to provide students with opportunities to actively engage with the broader world. Parallel efforts with conservation partners will increase Calflora's role in 'citizen science' programs by developing interfaces directed at providing education and involvement opportunities for adult amateurs.