Calflora Case Statement

What is Calflora?

Calflora is a unique and comprehensive source of data on California’s wild plants that provides analytical tools and an ability to display geographical plant occurrences.

Caflora’s website is a digital library that collects accurate and detailed information from many sources, including herbaria, partner websites, public agencies, non-profits, scientists, private donors, and you!

Calflora is where amateurs and professionals learn about California’s native and non-native wild plants, their distribution, rarity, current taxonomy, and perhaps their future. For most users, it is an irreplaceable resource for their work and interests.

Calflora’s most important and innovative services include detailed distribution maps, What Grows Here?, Weed (Invasive Plant) Manager, and the Planting Guide. Calflora provides many other services, including several developed in collaboration with other organizations.

Why Calflora?

When Calflora was formed in the 1990's, detailed ranges of wild plants in California were inaccessible. The information existed, unpublished, on herbarium sheets, in local floras and checklists, in Environmental Impact Reports, or in the thousands of personal records and photos of individual botanists and enthusiasts. There were few ways to share observations with others or to view accurate and up to date information on California’s plants, habitats, and distributions.

Without detailed and accurate information, it was difficult to develop objective conclusions about California plants, hampering the effectiveness of plant science, conservation and land management.

Detailed scientific information matters for conservation. We need tools and data to analyze species distribution in close detail, including changes over time. Calflora was a giant step forward in serving this need.

History

Dr. Ann Dennis started Calflora in 1994 with the support of the US Forest Service. The initial aim was to assess how management practices might affect wildlife, plant diversity, and forest health. Originally an 8-character DOS filename, Calflora was a database of species information that users could download and use on a personal computer.

Important early collaborators were the UC Berkeley Digital Library Research Project and the Library’s staff member, Tony Morosco. Subsequent versions of Calflora became web-searchable databases. In 2003, John Malpas, developer, revised the website further.

Calflora incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2000. Since then, Calflora’s collaborations have multiplied, and now include the incorporation of herbarium specimens from the Consortium of California Herbaria, and tools for weed management and native plant gardening.

The Calflora Website

Calflora is an exceptional digital library of information about California’s wild plants. Calflora’s user-friendly website gives researchers access to four million occurrence records and provides results on one million searches every year. In addition, Calflora is a free and open access resource. Some 10,000 individual observers have contributed observations to Calflora. Calflora provides access to a huge collection of reference photos curated by credentialed community members.

The Calflora website provides links to other important sources of information. For example, the site provides links to taxonomic and descriptive information from the Jepson eFlora and USDA PLANTS and non-native plant information from the California Invasive Plant Council.

Occurrence data in Calflora comes from many sources, including: authoritatively identified voucher specimens from the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH), survey data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Vegetation Mapping Project, and rare plant occurrences documented by the CDFW Natural Diversity Database.

In addition, Calflora also includes important records contributed by individuals from Calflora’s smartphone apps, records from land management agencies, checklists compiled by botanists, and data from surveys made by consulting companies.

Calflora includes powerful tools for organizing and analyzing information, allowing users to access and download data in several ways:

• Observation Search to search for observations and view them on a map.
• Plant Range to see the distribution of a particular species.
• What Grows Here? to view all plants documented at a particular location.

Users can export all published data in many formats. Calflora’s Weed (Invasive Plant) Manager users may also develop and download custom reports.

In 2017, Calflora added the Planting Guide application, which uses plant characteristics and geographic modeling to suggest which plants might thrive at a particular location as part of a restoration project or a native plant garden.

Who Uses Calflora?

Calflora is used by tens of thousands of botanists, agency staff, land managers, consultants, educators, students, gardeners, and amateurs. Calflora has been cited many thousands of times in published scientific research. It is used extensively by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service, as well as more local organizations, such as OneTam and the Mid Peninsula Open Space District. For most, Calflora is an irreplaceable resource.

Calflora is also a resource for the preparation of Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs), Recovery Plans, Post-Fire Assessments, rare plant monitoring, and weed management. It is also used for taxonomic and phenological research, and for generating regional checklists and locally sensitive lists.

Amateur botanists and students are enthusiastic users of Calflora. Many amateurs and students find Calflora’s detailed distribution data, identification aids, and photos to be useful, interesting, and informative. Every professional botanist was once an amateur botanist.

Why Trust Calflora?

Users trust Calflora because it is also a community of botanists and other knowledgeable specialists. These credentialed experts regularly review and comment on observations in the system. Through the Calflora comment system, this community works together to ensure the quality of Calflora’s information.

Calflora staff maintain and update all Calflora applications and resources, providing essential information on plant habitat and abundance.

Calflora has formed important partnerships for both data sharing and analysis with the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH), iNaturalist, the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), the National Park Service (NPS), the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC), and the California Natural Diversity Database (CNDDB). Calflora has developed custom products for several of these and other organizations.

Financial Needs

Calflora is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, funded through private donations and fee-for-service contract work. Calflora depends upon financial resources to maintain and improve its digital infrastructure. Calflora also seeks funding for the creation of new tools and for modernizing its systems. The State of California, the University of California, and the US Government do not currently fund Calflora.

Calflora’s current Mission Statement

The Calflora Database is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information about California plant biodiversity for use in Education, Research and Conservation. Calflora is structured as a digital library to fulfill the following objectives:

1. to serve as a repository for information on California wild plants in electronic formats from diverse sources, including public agencies, academic institutions, private organizations, and individuals;
2. to provide this information in readily usable electronic formats for scientific, conservation, and educational purposes;
3. to serve public information needs related to scientific study, land management, environmental analysis, education, and appreciation of California plant life.

Calflora relies on contributors for the information it provides; the website reflects the work of many individuals and institutions.