Nov. 6, 2023, 7:30 PM Calflora’s Cynthia Powell on Exploring the Wild Plants of California

See the Zoom presentation on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/_kToMF_ykD8

You might know  Calflora (https://www.calflora.org/) best as a digital library website that you can use to learn about plants that grow wild in California (both native plants and weeds) and in your neighborhood. Calflora foresees emerging and growing needs for information related to locally focused planning, education, and conservation and is paid for by the nonprofit organization of the same name, dedicated to providing information about California plant biodiversity for use in Education, Research and Conservation.

The Calflora database includes over 3.1 million plant observations, covering more than 8,000 plants.  Using Calflora you can: Find Out What Plant Observations Have Been Made... by a certain person, of a certain plant, in a certain area, or during a certain time period.  You can also Find Out What Plants Grow in a Place by zooming in and out of the map, or drawing a polygon.  There’s more! You can learn about Calflora’s more advanced features here (https://www.calflora.org/about-cf.html), where you will find links to many web applications concerning California plants.

Among the contributors to Calflora: the Consortium of California Herbaria, iNaturalist, public agencies, non-profits, scientists, private donors, and you!

Volunteers are an important part of the ongoing quality assurance process. If you are interested in wild plants in California, you are cordially invited to join this community. For instance, if you are aware of a plant growing wild in some park or other location where it is not yet shown on Calflora, we urge you to register as a contributor and to add an observation of that plant where you know it grows.  If it is an observation record that does not look right and you are a contributor, you can write a comment on the record. We pay attention to comments and answer emails, so what you see on Calflora is the product of the vigilance of many engaged users.

Calflora on YouTube!

Cynthia Powell is Calflora’s Executive Director. She graduated with her MS in GIS in 2010 forecasting Mokelumne River water supply based on MODIS remote sensing snow pack images. She’s been examining what was under that snow — plants — ever since. She coordinates all of Calflora’s programs, research, outreach, and advocacy, as well as fundraising and management.