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NEWS
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Updated April 20, 2018
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Volunteer Opportunites
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Creative Commons license.
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How to add wild plant observations to Calflora with Plant Observation Entry
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video
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Great Places to view California native plants:
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v. 2.03 of the Plant Distribution application
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The
Planting Guide
HELP
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Email alerts
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Need help with plant identification from a photo?
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Calflora on social media:
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Other News
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Applications
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Searching for Plants
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What Grows Here?
What Grows Here? (WGH) can display a thorough plant list for a chosen area of the state
in several formats.
Select the area by moving and zooming the map, or draw a polygon,
or choose a polygon from a background layer, such as the
boundary of a State Park.
The
What Grows Here? Wizard
is available to help find a location by name in California.
Starting from the wizard, you will end up in the map application.
WGH provides some interesting ways to visualize plant data --
for instance, displaying the locations of several plants
on the map at the same time, assigning a different icon
to each plant. A set of plant - icon assignments is called a palette.
For example, here are fifteen
commercially available, low-water native perennial grasses
displayed in
What Grows Here? starting near Santa Barbara.
Move the map to where you live, and discover which of these grasses
grow wild near you.
More Examples of Custom Palettes:
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Advanced Search for Plants
This application provides for
combinations of search criteria not available from
the regular Search for Plants, such as:
- Does USDA PLANTS recognize the name?
- Are photos available on CalPhotos, or not?
- Can it tolerate a soil pH of 4.0?
- Does it bloom in January?
This application will also search for the plants found
in a county, with a selectable level of evidence
(the minimum number of observations of the plant in the county).
So for instance, you could search for
plants
for which there are at least five observations in Del Norte County.
This application can show a list of plants
in a three-photo format (similar to the Illustrated Plant List),
or as plain text (easily imported into a spreadsheet or database).
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Search for Plants
The classic Calflora home page search interface, remade:
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A new search criterion,
Duration, now distinguished from Lifeform;
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Elevation
and other seldom used search criteria hidden at the bottom.
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Searching for Observations
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Observation Hotline
to search for observations with the help of a Google Map.
This application
shows contributed photos when they are available.
It is possible to limit the geographical extent of the search to
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Ceanothus gregii var. perplexans,
cupped leaf ceanothus,
San Diego Co.
© 2011 Sherie Hubble
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In addition to showing records contributed directly to Calflora,
Observation Hotline
can also show
specimen records from the
Consortium of California Herbaria,
and
observation records with photos from
iNaturalist.
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Map Background Layers
The various mapping applications can show a number
of background layers, or polygon sets.
Latest additions include
Accumulated Temperature,
Growing Season,
December Low,
July High,
and
Temperature Range
(all derived from data from the Prism Climate Group)
and various soil factors (eg. pH, Salinity)
from the NRCS SSURGO database.
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Entering Observations
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Smart Phone Applications
for Android and Apple devices.
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IPHONE and other Apple devices |
Get the Observer Pro app from
Google Play
(search for "Calflora")
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Get the Observer Pro app from
iTunes
(search for "Calflora Observer Pro")
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v. 2.0.111 released November, 2017
• As an Indenpendent, you can load your own list of historical records
• A map interface shows the boudning box for each offline map cache
v. 2.0.95 released April, 2016
• The map has a scale bar
• Polygons of historical records are visible
v. 2.0.76 released April, 2015
• View historical records
• Make new assessments of historical records
v. 2.0.48 released April, 2014 (first public version)
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v. 1.3 released December, 2017
v. 1.1.2 released June, 2017
v. 1.0 released April, 2017 (first public version)
About the app
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About the app
Calflora Observer Pro Users
Google Community
(discussion and tips about how to use the app)
Full Documentation
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Plant Observation Entry
to view, enter or edit a plant observation record.
Photos can be uploaded directly from your computer
to become part of your observation record.
If your photo is already on the web
(e.g. on a web photo service like Flickr or Picasa, or
on your own website), you can add the URL of
the photo to an observation record.
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Photo-to-observation File 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
when you edit the record in
Plant Observation Entry.
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Survey / Checklist Entry
to enter a survey or a checklist (many plants observed at one location).
This new application has replaced the classic
Checklist Entry application.
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Adding Lines and Polygons
The entry applications include
the ability to add a line
or polygon to a record.
Use it to describe the spatial extent of an plant population,
or the area covered by a survey or checklist.
For example, Jerry Baker added this polygon
to describe the extent of a patch of
Astragalus Brauntonii, Baunton's milk vetch, in Los Angeles Co.
(This screen shot is from the Plant Distribution application. Note the blue
point showing through, which is a previous record of the same plant.)
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Observation Upload
to upload an entire dataset directly into the database.
Copy and paste from a spreadsheet, or upload a shapefile.
During the process, you assign
fields in the dataset being uploaded
to fields in the Calflora database.
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Plant Information
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Planting Guide
Use this application to search for native plants likely to grow well at
your chosen location. Click on the map to indicate the location, press SEARCH,
and the results will show commercially available native plants
appropriate to the elevation, climate and soil of the chosen site.
When you are seeing a good plant list, you can download it as a spreadsheet or email
it to yourself, and then forward it to native plant nurseries
to find out what they have in stock.
In version 0.72, the TOOLS menu includes a Download spreadsheet link.
Here is an example:
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Location Suitability
From the Taxon Report page for the plant, click on the link to go to the Location Suitability page.
Click on the map to indicate the location of your garden. Scan the third column, "LOCATION VALUES", to see if there are any pink warnings indicating location values outside of the tolerances of the plant.
If there are warnings, you may want to try a different plant.
If there are NO warnings, then this plant is compatible with the conditions at your location. As a further sanity check, press
to find out if this plant has been reported growing wild, close to your location. If it does grow close by, this is a good sign that it could do well in your yard.
(See also the
discussion on CNPLX.)
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Taxon Report
The Taxon Report page is now mobile friendly.
If you view it on a narrow width device such as a phone or tablet, it will adapt to
show the most important information in a single long column.
Watch this
YouTube VIDEO
describing the Taxon Report page.
The map on the Taxon Report page indicates
plant presence by means of points and quads (instead
of by colored counties).
The map shows elevation in colors inspired by a
classic USGS map.
Mouse over the map to see county names, and
click on the map to see all records from that county
in Observation Hotline.
From the Taxon Report page, there are prominent links to
Example: the page for
Eriophyllum confertiflorum (golden yarrow).
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PlantID.net
PlantID.net is a new website which offers help in identifying
wild plants in Calfornia.
It has a really good search feature: from the top page, you can enter any of the following:
county
plant type (eg. "shrub")
flower shape
flower color
leaf shape
and the site will find the matching plants.
The site has lots of big photos, some of them annotated.
This site is the brainchild of Bruce Homer-Smith, and more useful features are coming.
For instance, here is an article on
Marin Manzanitas.
The Calflora Taxon Report page also has a link to the PlantID.net
page for the same plant, for those plants now covered by PlantID.net.
The link is in the More Information section; for instance
Arctostaphylos canescens.
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Plant Characteristics and Associations
This page shows the climate and soil tolerances
of a plant (the conditions under which the plant will grow).
Press the
Location Suitability
link on this page to match plant tolerances
with the climate and soil factors of a particular location.
From the Taxon Report page for a particular plant,
press the
Plant Characteristics
link in the center.
The climate factor,
Accumulated Temperature
helps to distinguish very hot places from moderately hot places.
Also, the factor fomerly known as Warm Months has been
recalculated and re-named
Growing Season.
Climate factors are mostly based on data from the
Prism Climate Group at Oregon State University.
Taken together, they describe the local climate of various locations in California.
By extension, the climate tolerances of a particular plant
can be inferred from values of the factors at locations
where the plant is known to grow.
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Metallic green sweat bee
© 2007 Gary McDonald
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Beneficial Insects:
Those plants known to be particularly attractive to beneficial insects
are marked with a butterfly icon.
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Plant Distribution
shows the statewide distribution of a plant
as a variable cell size grid, or as points.
From the
Taxon Report page for a particular plant,
press the Distribution Grid link.
The cells are colored to make a heat map, indicating
where a particular plant has been observed the most.
For instance, this page for
Rhamnus ilicifolia, hollyleaf redberry.
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Bloom Period
is shown on over 9,000+ Taxon Report pages.
(See
this note
for more about bloom period and the sources of the data.)
For example, see this page
for
Madia elegans.
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Madia elegans, common Madia
2011-8-31 Lassen Co.
© 2011 Orrin Winton
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Elevation
The elevation values of all observation records
were updated, in meters, by referencing the point location against
a digital elevation model.
Also, whenever you edit an observation record
in
Plant Observation Entry, and change the
point location,
you can see the elevation of the new location immediately by pressing
lookup elevation.
The application will also update
the elevation value automatically when you save the record.
The elevation value comes from the Google Maps Elevation API.
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Contributor Services
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Email Alerts
You can be notified by email whenever new observation records show up in the database.
For instance, you might want to be alerted when any new observation
of a certain plant shows up in a certain area.
To set up an alert, first use
Observation Hotline
to search for the plants you are interested in, in the area you are
interested in.
Then open TOOLS / SAVED SEARCHES, and save your search by name.
Then go to
My Calflora / Alerts. You will see the search you just saved in the
table of AVAILABLE SEARCHES. Click on that search, and choose whether
you want the alert every week or every month.
Here is an example of an alert, sent on September 1, 2016, for
Observations of Mimulus species with photos:
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Comment on Observations
There is a
comment system
for observations. If you are registered
as a contributor, you can add a comment on any observation record.
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Customize your Calflora Experience
My Calflora / Preferences:
If you have added photos to your Calflora observations,
you can choose to let others use your photo
according to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license
(Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0).
This only applies to photos attached to published observations..
Note that
Calflora is now sharing published invasive plant observations with
EDDMapS. When EDDMapS shows
an invasive plant observation from Calflora on their website, they would like to include a photo.
You can also specify your own center point for
observations. This becomes the starting point for various applications, including
Plant Observation Entry, My Observations, and Observation Hotline.
(If you haven't specified a center point, these applications start
near Fresno.)
If you belong to
groups,
you can specify a default group for all new observations you make with a phone app.
You can also ask to be notified by email
when there is new activity in one of your groups,
or when there are new comments about your records.
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My Observations
to review, edit and publish your observations.
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Plant List Definition
to define your own plant lists
to be used in the Observer and Observer Pro smart phone applications,
and in search applications.
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Observation Download
to search for and download observations in
a variety of formats.
Shapefiles are available as an Output Format.
Choose from
Shapefile: point,
Shapefile: line,
or
Shapefile: polygon.
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Technical Notes
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Calflora has incorporated new plant names from several sources.
There are
118 from the Jepson eFlora (revisions from 2013 and 2014), including
25 from USDA PLANTS, including
and 64 from the CNPS Inventory, including
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Most Taxon Report pages
have a link in the bottom right called
Jepson eFlora
which goes directly to the Jepson eFlora page
for that plant.
For example,
Linanthus pungens.
Calflora has incorporated the
Jepson Manual 2 scientific names into the Plant Name Library.
Search for what has become of particular plant names
with the
Name Status
application.
See also
Web Applications for Invasives
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Lewisia redidiva
Bitter root
© 2014 Vertin Alvarez
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Weed Manager: Resources, Applications, and Techniques
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The Taxon Report page:
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Groups and Comments:
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Climate and soil background layers
in various map applications
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What Grows Here? 2.0 released
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A crosswalk from
TJM2 names to USDA PLANTS names, and vice-versa
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Cynthia Powell, new GIS Project Manager at Calflora
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Best Plants, Best Practices 1.0 released
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150 new State Park checklists
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Cynthia Powell, Cal-IPC: 137,000 records!
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CNPS releases Online Inventory 8th Edition,
developed by Calflora with the CNPS Inventory team
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Iron Mountain and Ellie Lane Trails, Poway