Home » bplant.org Blog » Progress Bars & State Ecoregion Legends

Progress Bars & State Ecoregion Legends

March 11th, 2021 by Alex Zorach

We are excited to announce some new features: we have added progress bars to several pages, and also added legends and ecoregion lists to state ecoregion pages. We also added a column to tables listing articles, showing which plant and ecoregion articles are complete, on search pages and subregion listings.

At a glance, you can now see which pages are complete before visiting them. These changes will also help us to prioritize our work. These changes show up several places on our site.

Search Pages: Plant Lists

When you use the search bar at the top of our site to search for plants by common or scientific name, the results are displayed in a table, and the listings include a mix of articles in various stages of completion.

There are two new columns in the table. The first has a ✓ mark for articles whose text is complete and published. The final column notes the presence and resolution of the range map, which may be absent, auto-generated as explained in this blog post, or researched to be accurate to a certain level of ecoregions (usually 2 or 3, but we are hoping to get to 4 in time.)

Underneath the results, there is a yellow legend explaining what the symbols mean.

A screenshot of search results for quercus, with progress bars in the results and also in a section at the bottom

This screenshot shows two different types of progress bars on search results: one for the range map for each species, and bars denoting the completion of the set of plant pages returned in the search.

At the end of the page is a Progress section, showing the total progress for the subset of articles returned in the search. A similar section also appears now on pages with lists of subregions, which you can see below.

State Ecoregion Lists and Map Legends

We've had ecoregion maps for all lower 48 US states for over a year, but until this update, there was no list on the page for each state of which regions were found in which state. We recently added these listings along with a map legend.

As with the search page, in the legend we added a column notating which articles are completed, and which still need images. Similarly, there is also a "Progress" section below the legend, both on the pages for each state, and the pages for any ecoregion that has subregions (such as the level 1, 2, and 3 ecoregions.)

Screenshot of new map legend and subregion list above, and progress bar section below

This screenshot shows the new map legends and subregion list, as well as the progress bar section, in this case for the state of Connecticut.

We hope that these new features will make our site more useful, as well as helping you to track our progress. If you want to help our work progress more quickly, there are also numerous ways to get involved. We are always looking for open-licensed (CC BY or CC BY-SA) images for ecoregions that lack them, as well as for plant pages and ID guides. You can also donate to help fund our work. We also welcome corrections and suggestions on our articles or range maps, including data to help us complete or refine those maps.

If you stay tuned, we have more closely-related features under development too. In the near future we hope to allow you to request completion of specific articles and be notified when they are published. In the meanwhile, take a peek at what we just added! You can start by searching for your favorite plants, or browsing our pages for US states.