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We're Back After COVID-19 Setbacks

April 3rd, 2020 by Alex Zorach

You may have noticed an absence of blog and social media activity over the past several weeks.

A few weeks ago, I came down with a mysterious illness that I strongly suspect to be COVID-19. Although it was quite scary, I am recovering thoroughly. During this time, I also began coaching several of my friends who were also experiencing symptoms, some of them more serious cases than mine.

Between this and the additional stressors of the social isolation and changes to our society, I have put less time into working on bplant.org. However, I still did make some significant progress, I just have not been publishing updates on the results, because managing social media accounts can often be just as time-consuming as developing and maintaining the site itself. Rather than let the site's content suffer, I kept working on the site and scaled back my time put into social media.

I am feeling much better now and am back to having more time to work on the site. One good thing about the crisis we are in is that it doesn't affect my ability to work on the website at all, nor does it affect my ability to be out alone in nature working with plants, observing and photographing them in ways that synergize with my work on the site.

This photo shows a table mountain pine (Pinus pungens), a pine endemic to the Appalachians. This photo is located in the Southern Crystalline Ridges and Mountains ecoregion of the Blue Ridge. Photo © CK Kelly, CC BY 4.0, Source.

Update on Recent Progress

Some major progress over the past couple months includes completion of ecoregion articles for the following states:

We also have added images to some of these articles, although many of them still need images. You can read about our search for ecoregion photos in our previous blog post. We've already begun work on Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, and North Carolina.

We also continue to add new plant articles. Some of the latest:

These three articles are directly related to our completion of ecoregion articles in Michigan (where jack oak and northern white-cedar are key components of the forests) and Virginia and West Virginia (where table-mountain pine can be found in the Appalachians.) We have prioritized completing plant articles that are interlinked with our ecoregion articles.

And we have one new plant comparison guide:

Sweetbay Magnolia vs Southern Magnolia

This is just a selection of highlights of the work we have completed in recent months. We also did a ton of expansion and improvement to existing articles.