Here At The Academy

CalFlora: Library of California Plants

Anne Marie Malley

Ann Dennis and Tony Morosco tend to CalFlora, a database of all California's plants. It allows users to locate plants to the nearest cities, roads, or even individual trees by using satellite and other geographic data.

In a former storefront in Albany, California, two of the Academy’s newest employees sit at Information Central for plants.

Whether a teacher wants a list of the flora of Sonoma County, a college student is looking for photos to identify plants encountered on a trip to the Sierra Nevada, or an eighth grader needs information about the endangered Presidio manzanita, Ann Dennis and Tony Morosco can help. If a Forest Service pathologist tracking sudden oak death outbreaks is gathering distribution information for rhododendron and madrone to locate infected plants, or a landscape architect is checking to see what native plants are likely to thrive in an area being replanted, he or she probably first visited the duo’s botanical hub.

Dennis and Morosco tend CalFlora, which may be the singlemost comprehensive electronic guide to California’s nearly 8,400 vascular plants. Providing critical data such as distribution and habitat information, as well as links to additional resources on natives and pests, CalFlora has become an important tool for conservation, research, and public education. The database processes over 14,000 searches a day and contains over 790,000 specimen records. It also lists current and historic scientific names and their evolution.

CalFlora’s strength lies in its integrative design. The database combines information from government agencies, academic institutions, herbaria, and private individuals into one central electronic library. “The approach was not to create a new body of information,” says Dennis, the project’s director. “Instead, it was to use new technologies to unite the sources of information that already exist.”

Since it is electronic, CalFlora has more flexibility than traditional printed material. For instance, any book, report, or field guide contains only the images and text selected at print date. CalFlora can provide up to the minute data for any given plant, allowing users to search for whatever information is important to them. One can also choose from a variety of images of the plant, restrict searches to include, say, only a few counties, and use the GIS Viewer to overlay maps, aerial photos, and satellite images to visualize species distribution, or even locate the nearest specimen to a specific road or tree. And the database can be continuously updated.

While information available on the Internet is often unreliable, CalFlora provides a framework of standards similar to those found in academic publications—each statement is sourced and it lists exactly who contributed each record and image.

CalFlora was born in 1994 when Dennis compiled a database for the United States Forest Service to help assess how their management practices might affect wildlife, plant diversity, and forest health. “When you cut timber or build roads across mile after mile of landscape, your actions can degrade native plant diversity. Even if none of the species you affect is rare in an absolute sense, those local species losses have an effect that reverberates throughout the ecosystem,” Dennis says. The Forest Service wanted details—exactly which species lived where.

Then Morosco joined Dennis in 1997. With the help of UC Berkeley’s Digital Library Project, CalFlora’s web host, they turned it into the user-friendly system it is today.

By the time the Forest Service project was completed in 1998, the database had gained a broad spectrum of users, and the United States Geological Survey funded Dennis and Morosco to continue their work. In 2000, Dennis secured additional funding from other sources to make CalFlora its own nonprofit organization. Then, in late 2001, it joined forces with the Academy.

Although their partnership is recent, the two organizations have been collaborating for some time. More than one third of the database’s 25,000 photos come from the Academy’s own online photo archive, known as the Manzanita Project. Moreover, during the past year, the Academy’s Biodiversity Resource Center has increasingly been helping CalFlora answer users’ questions about plants.

The next step for CalFlora is to accept data directly from the public, a prospect with far-reaching implications. For example, school groups in field study programs could make their observations available to a wider audience. “When people can mess with the data, they get excited,” and then they are more likely to participate in protecting California’s biodiversity, Dennis says. Although this could potentially jeopardize data reliability, the team has come up with a solution. All the data will be linked to the individual or organization who submitted it. Users will be able to omit data from sources they don’t trust.

Dennis and Morosco’s success has much to do with developing relationships with those who produce the data—the land managers, the botanists, the wildlife area administrators, and the amateur enthusiasts. But while Morosco finds working with such a complex network of people fascinating, he, like Dennis, sees providing crucial information to the public as the true reward. “Whether it’s the child writing a report on a local tree who needs a picture, or a land manager trying to get a handle on the plant biodiversity in their county, or the botanist looking for reports of an uncommon lily, creating a forum for the exchange of plant information is satisfying,” he says.

Anne Marie Malley is the California Academy of Sciences’ Librarian.