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Choosing The Best Common Names For Plants: Challenges & Solutions

April 19th, 2024 by Alex Zorach

Plants can be referred to either by common or scientific names. Scientific names, in theory, are less ambiguous. In practice though, there are limitations to scientific names too. Changes in or disagreement about taxonomy, combined with information propagating from older sources, can lead the same plant to be referred to by different scientific names. An example are the Joe Pyes (Eutrochium sp.) which are often still sold in nurseries as Eupatorium sp. in spite of being treated by most authorities as belonging to a separate genus for years now.

In other cases, the same name might refer to different groups of plants, such as when a species gets split into two or more species, an older source might use one name to refer to the entire population whereas newer sources might use that name only refer to a limited subset. An example is Phragmites australis, which some sources use to refer to both populations we consider to belong to the native American common reed (Phragmites americanus) and the introduced eurasian common reed (Phragmites australis), which were formerly considered to be subspecies of the same species. In this example, the common name "Eurasian common reed" is actually more ambiguous than saying Phragmites australis, because it is clear with the modifier "Eurasian" that you are referring only to the introduced Eurasian taxon, whereas with only the scientific name it is not clear whether you consider the native American taxon to be a subspecies of the same species, or a separate species.

Common names can provide continuity through taxonomic changes, and also have the advantage of being in widespread use and more accessible. Names built from everyday words instead of in a separate scientific language is a major reason for their greater accessibility and common use. Both types of names are important, so on bplant.org we use both common and scientific names to refer to plants.

Because there are often multiple common names in use for a particular plant, we are often presented with the problem of choosing which name to use. Although we list all the widely-used common names we can find at the top of each article, and allow searching by each name, we still must pick a single common name to display wherever a particular species is mentioned on our site.

The casual nature of common names provides us flexibility. Scientific names are bound by rules governing which name is valid. If you agree on taxonomy, you can follow the rules and usually reach a consensus about which name to use for a particular species. With common names, because they are more arbitrary, you can simply choose which one to use. At bplant.org, we are opting to use that freedom to address some common naming problems, and communicate as much information as clearly as possible.

Problems With Some Common Names

There are numerous ways common names can be problematic. One of the worst things that can happen is if the name is ambiguous. For example, referring to a plant only as "hemlock" is problematic because it can refer to evergreen conifers of the Tsuga genus, but it can also refer to toxic carrot-family plants such as poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) or spotted water hemlock (Cicuta maculata). In some cases, even names contaning modifiers can be ambiguous; for example, "Spanish oak" can refer to southern red oak (Quercus falcata), Texas red oak (Quercus buckleyi), or to Quercus ×hispanica, a hybrid of European turkey oak (Quercus cerris) and cork oak (Quercus suber), both of which are introduced plants in North America. Such examples are widespread and we do our best to avoid such ambiguity, and notate it in the "Notes" field of each article when it does occur.

Another problem is that certain plant names can be offensive, such as by containing racial slurs. These names, thankfully, are getting phased out, and we also are doing our best to avoid offensive names.

Slightly more subtle problems include plants where the descriptor is misleading. For example, Japanese creeper (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) is often referred to in the US as "Boston Ivy" which is misleading as it is not native to Boston. Another example that is less-well-known but perhaps more-misleading is Savoy hawkweed (Hieracium sabaudum), which is frequently referred to as "New England hawkweed". This name is misleading as it is not native to New England, nor is it particularly widespread in New England, absent from 3 states and only reported in isolated counties of the others, whereas many other hawkweeds, such as rough hawkweed (Hieracium scabrum), are not only native but widespread and found in virtually all parts of New England.

Sometimes the misleading aspects of the name refer to the plant's physical characteristics. For example, black-fruited clearweed (Pilea fontana) is sometimes referred to as "lesser clearweed", but the species of clearweed (Pilea) that it most overlaps with is Canadian clearweed (Pilea pumila), and the sizes of these two species are both variable with nearly-full overlap, so the name wrongly leads people to expect that P. fontana is smaller. Another example involving morphology appears in sweet wood reed (Cinna arundinacea), which is sometimes referred to as "stout wood reed". This grass is not particularly stout; its stems are slender relative to a number of other grasses of similar height, its blades are narrower than many related grasses, and it also tends to have a tall and narrow form, certainly not the most "stout" growth habit even compared to other grasses that occur together with it in the same habitat.

These examples guide us towards a set of criteria for choosing the best common names. In some cases, the descriptiveness of a less-commonly-used name is so superior that we have decided it is worth favoring it in the interest of education and clarity.

What makes a good common name?

The best common names tend to fit the following patterns:

• They are unambiguous, used only to refer only to one species and not others.
• They are already widely in use.
• Their full names communicate categorical relationships, such as membership in a particular genus or other taxon.
• They coincide with or directly relate to the scientific name, such as being a direct translation of the Latin.
• They are inoffensive.
• They accurately describe the plant's native range.
• They accurately describe some prominent physical characteristic of the plant.
• They accurately describe of the plant's habitat.

Most names do some of these things together. For example, "swamp white oak" communicates three layers of taxonomy: oak refers to the Quercus genus, "white oak" to the white oak section within that genus, and "swamp white oak" completely specifies the species Quercus bicolor. Furthermore, the term "swamp" accurately communicates that this species tends to grow in wetter habitats than other oaks; it is one of the bottomland oaks, usually found on moist sites with poor drainage. On top of these things "white oak" also references the lighter color of the wood, and often bark, of that class of oaks relative to red oaks, the other major grouping in North America.

Another such example is "Limber pine dwarf mistletoe", which communicates not only membership in the Arceuthobium genus (Dwarf mistletoes), but that this is a specific species, (Arceuthobium cyanocarpum) and that limber pine (Pinus flexilis) is one of its hosts.

Sometimes we pick name because it is "less bad".

There are, unfortunately, a lot of cases where it is not possible to pick a name that ticks even most of the more important boxes discussed above. For example, we stuck with the name Robin's plantain (Erigeron pulchellus) even though it is slightly misleading and the descriptor "Robin's" isn't particularly informative. Erigeron pulchellus is not a plantain (Plantago sp.), although its rosette of basal leaves pressed tightly against the ground is slightly evocative of that genus. We stuck with that name not only because it is by far the most widely-used, but also because the only other names are ambiguous or even more misleading. For example, it is sometimes called "hairy plantain" but that more often refers to hairy fleabane (Erigeron pubescens). And it is sometimes called "blue spring daisy" but it does not belong to the daisy (Bellis) genus nor even the Bellidinae tribe, and its flowers are not particularly blue, usually at closest a bluish purple or lavender, not even the bluest of the Erigeron genus, a title that in Eastern North America would go to oakleaf fleabane (Erigeron quercifolius).

Another unfortunate example is Maryland sanicle (Sanicula marilandica) which is also called Maryland bleck snakeroot. Although the "Maryland" descriptor coincides with the scientific epithet marilandica, it is misleading. This primarily northern species is more common and widespread from New England through the Upper Midwest and well into Canada; although native to Maryland, it only occurs in isolated locations throughout the state, and with global warming has become increasingly rare in much of its range there. It is not and was never the most common or widespread sanicle (Sanicula) in the state; that title goes to Canadian blacksnakeroot (Sanicula canadensis), which, also contrary to its scientific and common names, is the more southerly of the two species.

Sometimes a careful choice can fix these confusing scenarios. For example, another pairing with misleading common names is narrow-leaved spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) and northern spring beauty (Claytonia caroliniana), which are often referred to, respectively, as "Virginia" and "Carolina" spring beauties, in correspondence with their scientific names. As with the two sanicles above, the ranges of these species are reversed from what the names would suggest. Although "Carolina spring beauty" is native to the Carolinas, it is only native to high elevations in the mountains in their most inland portions. Of the two species it is definitively the more northerly of the species, preferring northern hardwood forests that grow in cooler climates. The name "northern spring beauty" is thus much more descriptive than "Carolina", especially relative to "Virginia spring beauty", since the Carolinas are farther south than Virginia. In this case, we were able to make a better choice because the common names "narrow-leaved spring beauty" and "northern spring beauty" were already in use. But these names might still be slightly "bad" to some people in that they may be less familiar, and they do not correspond to the scientific epithets.

Progress at Updating Common Names

As you can see from the examples above, updating common names requires research and balancing of multiple aspects, including common usage, range, ecology, and morphology, among other considerations. So it can be a slow process. But we think it is important as it serves the goal of making our material as accessible and educational as possible.

Nearly all (all but 37) of the plants listed on our site have at least one common name listed; in most cases, we defaulted to the common names used by the USDA PLANTS database, but over time, we plan on reviewing all common names. Where multiple common names are in use, we have found that the a large portion of the USDA PLANTS common names differ from the choices we would ideally make, and we have been updating our names as we review records. The USDA names more often coincide more closely with scientific names, which is only one of many criteria we use and not the one we give the highest priority.

We have currently added alternate common names to 708 plants, and of these, we have chosen common names to avoid misleading names in at least 47 cases and resolve ambiguity in at least 24 cases. As with all our work, the checking of common names is an ongoing process.

As always, we appreciate everyone who has donated to support our site. Donations help fund the work described here, as well as all the other work we have been doing recently, including building and refining range maps, completing new ID Guides and ecoregion and plant articles, and maintaining the site's servers and software to keep it up and running and loading quickly. Although we have received substantial funding we still are far from our funding goals and remain a mostly-volunteer effort. The long-term goal is to fund a larger team of people to work full-time on the site, but for now we are still working to get a sustainable annual budget to support my work on the site. Thank you to everone who has contributed!

Range Map & Taxonomic Update Progress

January 31st, 2024 by Alex Zorach

Back in September of 2022 we announced that we had completely retired our first-generation range maps, replacing them with new and improved maps. However, many aspects of our maps remained incomplete. Many species still lacked maps, and most maps were strictly limited to the lower 48 US states, not extending into Canada, Alaska, or Mexico.

We have since made great strides in map completion:

• 16838 plants now have range maps. This is over 81.5% of the plants listed on our site.
• 5061 maps have been completed for all of North America, including Canada, Alaska, and Mexico for species that occur there. This is now over 30% of our published maps.
• 5653 plants (over 27% of plants) have been interlinked with Plants of the World Online (POWO) and had their taxonomy updated to reflect the information from POWO.
  
• We began marking plants that we wanted to list on our site, but that do not occur in the wild in North America and thus have no map or an empty map. We currently list 27 such plants and this number will probably increase quickly now that we have this category.

What is perhaps most exciting, however, is not reflected in the numbers alone: we have developed techniques and frameworks for building range maps outside the lower 48 states. This means it is just a matter of time and hard work before the remaining maps are completed.

Why has the rate of map completion slowed down?

If you have been following us since the beginning, you will notice that our rate of completion of range maps has slowed down considerably. We have been putting more time and effort into range maps recently though. The slowdown is both because we completed the easier maps first, and because we are developing higher standards as we further refine existing maps.

In many cases, constructing maps was straightforward because there was complete, accurate data available from the various sources we consult, and the different authorities agreed on plant ranges and establishment means (i.e. native vs. introduced.)

In other cases, things get messy. Sometimes data is missing or incomplete. Often, different sources disagree, and we need to research and make tough judgment calls about which material to accept as correct. Common issues include misidentifications, and different standards in different sources about when to consider a record a cultivated plant, vs. a waif (a transient introduction into the wild that does not persist), vs. solidly established in the wild. Many plants also have taxonomic complexities, such as splits, merges, and other reclassifications. Taxonomy can also interact with identification issues, such as when a record was identified as a particular variety or subspecies, but that taxon then later up getting moved into another species.

We have been building our range maps by conducting multiple sweeps through the data. On each sweep, we construct maps using the tools and processes we have available, and put a certain portion of the remaining map in a "messy" bin, to do later. At the same time, we also work to improve and streamline our map building process. Over time, the plants left in the "messy" bin become progressively more difficult to deal with, so even with better tools to facilitate our work, our maps become slower to build with each pass.

Our standards are also higher with our second-generation range maps; early on we just wanted to get something out, whereas now we have more different categories on the map legend and are taking care to notate uncertainty in the map itself. Related to these high standards, if you see something that you think is inaccurate or could be improved, please contact us. You do not need to be an expert to help us refine our maps. Seeing a species in the wild outside its reported range, or just seeing something on a map that you think doesn't make sense, are both signs that you may have something to contribute.

Interlinking with Plants of The World Online (POWO)

POWO is a taxonomic backbone run by the Kew Botanical Garden in London. In contrast to our routine, mostly-automated interlinking with other databases, our interlinking with POWO involves examining POWO's treatment of each taxon and comparing it to the schemes used by other authorities. Records integrated with POWO have mostly been brought up-to-date with modern taxonomic changes. In the overwhelming majority of cases, we adopt POWO's treatment. In the few cases where we adopt a different treatment (this usually happens in the rare cases where POWO is not up-to-date on newer work and another source we consult is), we still carefully examine POWO's listing. In a few cases we have enacted splits that POWO has not, in line with Flora of the Southeastern U.S. (FSUS) by Alan Weakley.

Differences in classification are a primary reason for discrepancies in plant range maps between different sources. There is often not a 1-to-1 relationship between records. You can read about how we resolved these discrepancies in the notes fields on each plant page. Taxonomy notes are located above the table-of-contents, right under the plant's names. This placement ensures people will have a clearer idea of what taxon the page refers to before reading the article or seeing the map, in the case that there have been confusing reclassifications or inconsistencies in naming. The range map notes are found directly under the map, and explain any judgment calls we made in constructing the map as well as any clarifying info beyond that conveyed by the legend.

Although the notes are brief on most articles, and many articles lack notes entirely, the total extent of notes is massive. We have already published over 16,000 words in the taxonomy notes, and over 58,000 words in the range map notes. This amounts to about 250 full pages of text. These counts do not include automatically-generated legends nd other verbal notes listed under many maps. The volume of these notes explains why our progress on the more difficult plants is progressing more slowly. We want to make sure we both document and explain our choices, especially in the cases where different sources disagree on taxonomy or ranges.

No Maps: Plants Not Occurring in The Wild in North America

Although we focus on plants occuring in the wild in North America, we list a number of plants with empty range maps, meaning that these species are not and have never been found in the wild here. These plants broadly fit into one of two categories: plants that are widely cultivated, but have never established or been recorded in the wild, or plants that were reported somewhere in the wild but where those records were later deemed to be invalid. We retain both of these types of records for several reasons.

For garden and landscaping plants not recorded establishing in the wild, it is always possible that these plants will establish in the wild at some point in the future. Being aware of these plants and knowing how to identify them can ensure they are more quickly detected if they ever do escape and naturalize.

Some plants were widely planted for years or even decades without naturalizing, only to eventually escape into the wild, sometimes even becoming invasive. For example, kudzu (Pueraria montana) was brought to the US in 1876, but the first herbarium specimen we could find, collected from the wild in North America, was from 1901, and kudzu was not recognized as invasive until decades after that.

It is also possible that plants are already present in the wild in North America, but that people have not reported them because they are hard to identify and/or they do not know that they need to check against them. For eaxmple, we have found Japanese honewort (Cryptotaenia japonica) in the wild in two ecoregions, in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and that species is not reported occurring in the wild by BONAP or POWO. Excepting the purple-leaf cultivar, that species may be underreported because it is visually similar to the native honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis).

A completely different scenario is when older sources report a particular plant somewhere in North America, but the record has been deemed invalid. In these cases, we retain a record specifically because there is other information out there that needs to be corrected. Even when the original source has been updated to correct the record, it is common, especially with sites like USDA PLANTS, that numerous other websites and print sources repeated the inaccurate information before it was corrected, and these other sources are often not corrected. Sometimes misinformation can propagate in secondary sources for decades after the original source corrected it because no one goes back to check the primary source. In the plant world, this phenomenon is especially prevalent in sources relating to horticulture, gardening, and the commercial nursery industry, where the standards of scholarship are much lower than in the sort of scientific sources we rely on.

Examples of such plants include mountain soursop (Annona montana), Syrian cephalaria (Cephalaria syriaca), braceletwood (Jacquinia armillaris), and willowleaf frostweed (Helianthemum salicifolium). We have noticed such errors are especially common in south Florida where there is a huge volume of introduced tropcial species that cannot survive in most of the rest of the continental US.

The First Range Maps and Lists for Canada and Mexico Finer-Tuned Than Provinces/States

One thing that has frustrated me for years is the lack of fine-tuned range maps and plant lists for regions outside the US, particularly, for Canada and Mexico. Apart from specific sources such as the Silvics of North America, which only covers about 200 tree species, and some print field guides, which similarly do not exhaustively cover the plants of North America, there are no sources with range data as fine-tuned as that presented by BONAP and USDA Plants.

Although Canada and Mexico both have administrative divisions finer than States and Provinces, there is no equivalent of USDA PLANTS and BONAP for these countries. Canadensys, the closest to a Canadian analogue of these sources, only has data at the level of individual provinces, and the existence of finer-tuned regional data, when it is available at all, is spotty and not accessible in a single place. In Mexico, there is no such website at all.

Although the lack of data has made it much harder for us to build range maps in Canada and Mexico, it also makes our maps much more valuable and groundbreaking in the cases in which we have been able to build them. In these cases, our maps offer a finer level of detail than anything else out there.

The process of constructing these maps is slow and also error-prone. In many cases, it involves examining individual herbarium records. Although there are good tools (the most important of which is GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility), there are numerous limitations of the data available. Some herbarium specimens have yet to be digitized, thus making it hard to assess the completeness of some range maps (i.e. it being harder to conclude that a species does not occur somewhere, relative to knowing that it does occur somewhere.) Where records exist, many records have geolocation errors, and in many cases there is insufficient verbal description of the location to catch such errors. Even when the locations are accurate, other aspects of the records can be erroneous, such as plants reported as wild that were actually cultivated, or specimens that were misidentified. And on top of this, we have all the same reclassification issues discussed above, but they are uglier because different herbaria (and even different individuals) may follow different schemes, and reclassifications can thus play out differently from one record to the next.

The process of building these maps thus involves delving into individual herbarium records in a way that rarely is necessary when constructing maps for the lower 48 US. As such, it is much slower. However the results can be rewarding.

As we complete these maps, we move towards plant lists for ecoregions outside the continental US. Back when we launced ecoregion-based plant lists in March of 2022, a major deficiency of our lists was that we had no lists for Canada, Alaska, and Mexico. Although we have not completed them, we are seeing the beginnings of these lists for all three of these regions, and it's just a matter of time before they are complete enough that we can publish tentative lists. Our work is also improving the accuracy and completeness of the plant lists for ecoregions that are split between the lower 48 US and either Canada or Mexico, and there are many such regions. Canada and Alaska will likely be completed long before Mexico, both because there is much less plant biodiversity in the Arctic and more in the Tropics, and also because there are more sources available for Canada and Alaska, and lastly because there is less of a language barrier.

Moving Forward: Things To Come

You can expect a continued focus on range map completion over the next few months. We are still in a phase where we are getting a lot done and we hope to keep improving our tools and techniques so that we don't end up getting completely stuck on the difficult maps. So far, so good!

I also want to thank everyone too for ongoing financial support that has allowed me to keep working on this project. Although we still have not met our next financial goal of $20,000, we are getting a lot closer to it. The vision of expanding into a larger organization with staff may remain far off, but for now we are able to keep the site going and keep it ad-free for the forseeable future. I have not yet published the year-end finances but this is another thing to expect in the next several weeks.

Giving Thanks To Everyone We Rely On

November 22nd, 2023 by Alex Zorach

The Thanksgiving holiday is approaching in the US, and we want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to our site, whether financially or otherwise, over the past year and since the founding of our site.

These contributors include financial donors, people who have helped share our material so it reaches a broader audience, and also those who have provided corrections, bug reports, feature and article requests, and other valuable feedback. Lastly, we want to thank the numerous other organizations, websites, publications, and groups whose work we rely on, and the people who created and maintain these works.

Thank You For Financial Contributions!

As the year is not yet over, we don't have full financial results to report, and we still have quite a way to go towards our next goal, but we still have several things to give thanks for on the fundraising front. 2023 is the first year in which an appreciable number of donors returned to give a second time. Furthermore, many of these donors not only increased their contribution amount, but switched from a one-time donation to annual and/or quarterly subscriptions. These subscriptions are particularly helpful as they help us to develop a sustainable budget while minimizing the amount of effort we need to put into fundraising.

We also hosted our first in-person event, a plant walk in Newark, DE, and attendees of this event generously donated $160 towards the site. These sorts of donations are especially helpful because they allow us to raise funds in the context of educational programming, again reducing our need to put resources into fundraising. We plan to host more such events in the near future.

Thank You For Sharing and Engagement!

The main purpose of bplant.org is educational: we want to provide information that will ultimately drive real-world conservation, such as protection and restoration of wild habitats and the species that depend on them, and the use of locally-native plants in landscaping and gardening. The goal is to shift human society from having a negative to having a positive effect on our environment.

To achieve these goals, our material needs to reach as broad an audience as possible. And people are already helping us to do that, by engaging with and resharing our posts. As with donations, when people share our material it reduces the energy we need to put into publicizing our articles, and frees up more resources for us to work on the website itself.

In 2023 we achieved some new records; our post on yellow nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus) reached over 73,650 people and was shared a total of 188 times. These shares have real-world implications: in the case of yellow nutsedge, that species is native (by most definitions) to much of the U.S., but people expend great resources trying to eradicate it, mostly in monoculture lawns, and often without much regard to its lifecycle or habitat requirements. Yellow nutsedge can be a problematic weed in certain types of cropland but not others; it also has value to wildlife, including to turkeys.


We hope to take the energy people spend trying to control "weeds" like yellow nutsedge in lawns, and redirect it towards controlling invasives and/or protecting native plants. Related to this goal, we are also pleased that our most popular two pages on our site, both with over 11,000 people viewing them annually, are the comparison guides for Norway Maple vs. Sugar Maple, and Red Mulberry vs. White Mulberry; each of these compares a native species to an easily-confused invasive relative.

Thank You For Corrections, Bug Reports, and Requests!

Yet another way people contribute to our site is through feedback. Such contributions can take the form of corrections, bug reports, feature requests, or requests for us to prioritize certain articles or ID guides.

Although we always do our best to keep our site as accurate as possible, there are still a lot of errors. The errors include typos, misinformation, omissions, and errors in plant ranges and/or native status. Over time, as people catch and report these mistakes, it helps us to improve the quality of our site as a reference for everyone. We want to thank each and every person who has sent us a correction, whether for something as small as a typo, or something as big as inaccurate information about whether or not a plant is native to a certain area.

Bug reports are also crucial. Over the past year, we fixed bugs reported by users in diverse components of the site, including glitches in the donation system, problems with the search function, broken or incorrect links, and erroneous information displayed in tables.

We also welcome requests for completing or expanding articles or ID guides. With a site of this magnitude and scope, there are literally thousands of choices of where to focus our efforts, and it can be challenging to know which tasks to prioritize. Requests from readers are one of our best guides!

Thank You To All Other Organizations, Publications, and People We Rely On!

Lastly, we want to give thanks for the many other organizations that we rely on. Our site would not be possible without the countless other resources we consult as references, and we have used so many that it is not possible to list them exhaustively.

Some key resources we rely on for building and maintaining our range maps include BONAP and USDA PLANTS. We also make heavy use of regional resources including Go Botany, Maryland Biodiversity Project, Calflora, Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora, Illinois Wildflowers, Minnesota Wildflowers, and Missouri Plants, E-Flora BC, and the Flora of the Southeastern US, among others. Many of these sites also have information on habitat, faunal relationships, and identification.

A key resource we use for plant taxonomy and global range maps is POWO. For referencing garden and landscaping use we consult resources including the MOBOT's Plant Finder and the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. For information about ecology and habitat, we also rely heavily on the US Forest Service's Fire Effects Information System, and for trees, the Silvics of North America. We consult Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for its searchable field-based data on just about all aspects of plants, Flora of North America for detailed botanical descriptions, and NatureServe Explorer for information on the conservation status of plants. On top of this we rely on many print sources not available online, one of the most useful of which is Plants of Pennsylvania by Rhoads and Block.

A key resource we use for many different purposes is iNaturalist; we use iNaturalist for investigating user-reported data about plant distribution around the edges of their range, for connecting with people knowledgeable about plant ID and habitat, and as a massive repository of open-licensed images for use in our articles and ID guides. Two of the images in this blog post came from iNaturalist! Another resource we are grateful for for its open-licensed images, particularly for ecoregions, is Flickr, and yet another is Wikimedia Commons. Without iNaturalist, our ID guides would progress much slower, and without Flickr, our process of finding ecoregion images would also be much slower.

Over time we have also been interlinking our plant articles with more of these resources.

In addition we participate in countless Facebook groups focused on local and regional native plants, invasive plant control, plant identification and education, and ecological restoration and habitat management. These groups are key not only for helping share our material, but for gathering information and getting valuable feedback. And, like all the above resources, these groups are maintained through the hard work of numerous individuals, especially those acting as moderators and administrators.

We both want to give thanks to these organizations, publications, and informal groups, and the people who run them, and the authors and maintainers of the many books and websites we use. We also want to draw attention to these resources so that the readers of our site can discover and consult them for additional information beyond what they may find here. And we encourage those with the means to do so to also contribute to some of these other resources, as they are all immensely important, serving related purposes than synergize with our mission. For entities funded through the government and/or receiving a component of government funding, you can also write to your relevant representatives to let them know that you appreciate the resources and want to ensure that they stay well-funded and well-staffed.

Thank you to all and enjoy your holiday to those who celebrate it!