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2022 Year-End Summary: Successes & New Goals

February 15th, 2023 by Alex Zorach

2022 was a big year for us, with the launch of ecoregion-based plant lists and searches, interlinking with numerous websites and databases, and beginning the difficult work of bringing the taxonomy of the plants on our site up-to-date. In addition to starting new projects, we completed others, retiring our first-generation range maps and fully replacing them with our newer, better maps. We also had some major fundraising successes.

On top of this we have been chugging away at other less-announced and behind-the-scenes progress, continuing to complete range maps for species that lack them, and continuing to link up records between our database and other databases for taxa that do not have a simple one-to-one correspondence between the records. As we do this, we are building tools that help this work to proceed faster and more smoothly.

Fundraising Successes, But Still Far From Even Mid-Term Goals

In 2022 we more-than-tripled our number of donors, and nearly tripled our total revenue, which mostly came from donations. You can find more details on our 2022 financial statement.

Although this growth is a major success and we would like to celebrate it, and we are very grateful to all our current supporters, we want to emphasize that we are still far from being able to pay even a single person a living wage. This website has been primarily a volunteer effort for years now, going back to 2018 before its launch, and we have achieved all our success with no funding beyond the donations and other minimal revenue displayed on our financial statements.

In order for this project to be sustainable and to realize its goals, we will need a lot more support than we are currently getting, so we would encourage you to continue giving, consider donating if are able to and have not yet done so, and perhaps also networking to recruit other donors.

Adjusting Donation Quantities for Inflation

Inflation has been high since we launced our donation system, and the costs for our infrastructure have increased, as well as general cost-of-living which has diluted the real value of donations. As such we have adjusted the recommended values for inflation, which amounts to an increase of +7%. You can see the new values on our donate page, which is always accessible in the top-right corner (in a hidden menu on mobile.) We will continue to update these values in the future. Existing subscriptions for recurring donation will not be affected, but we would appreciate it if you would update your subscription quantities as well. Unfortunately our system does not allow automatic inflation-adjustment of the quantities.

You can edit your subscription by logging on, visiting your profile, then clicking the "Donations" tab. This option is currently only available for people who gave recurring donations; we have not yet launched user accounts for other donors but we may do this in the near future.

More ID/Comparison Guides

The ID/Comparison guides remain one of the most popular aspects of the site, perhaps due to filling a much-needed niche intermediate between the "hardcore" floras and dichotomous keys, and more accessible but sometimes-oversimplified popular sources that gloss over tougher aspects of plant ID. Although these guides are time-consuming to construct, we continue to prioritize them because plant ID is critically important in both ecological restoration as well as selection of plants for use in gardening and landscaping.

In 2022 we started a total of 35 new plant ID guides, 15 of which are now completed, and we also completed other guides that were under construction. Our total number of published, completed guides is now 99.

Wildrye (Elymus) Guides

Among new guides we have started ID guides for the Elymus (wildrye) genus, which, in North America, are mostly native cool-season perennial bunchgrasses. So far we have completed:

• Riverbank Wildrye (Elymus villosus) vs. Silky Wild Rye (Elymus villosus)


• Early Wildrye (Elymus glabriflorus) vs. Southeastern Wildrye (Elymus glabriflorus)


• Canada Wildrye (Elymus riparius) vs. Riverbank Wildrye (Elymus riparius)


• Canada Wildrye (Elymus glabriflorus) vs. Southeastern Wildrye (Elymus glabriflorus)


• Early Wildrye (Elymus riparius) vs. Riverbank Wildrye (Elymus riparius)

Numerous other guides are underway, some of which are mostly completed, and will be published soon.

Pine (Pinus) Guides

We also continued adding more pine ID guides, gradually moving towards the more southeastern pines:

• Loblolly Pine (Pinus strobus) vs. Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus)


• Shortleaf Pine (Pinus taeda) vs. Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda)


• Pitch Pine (Pinus taeda) vs. Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda)


• Shortleaf Pine (Pinus strobus) vs. Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus)


• Loblolly Pine (Pinus elliottii) vs. Slash Pine (Pinus elliottii)

There are also numerous pine guides under construction and close to publication.

Other Guides

In addition we added other random guides. For example, Rhomboid Mercury (Acalypha australis) vs. Asian Copperleaf (Acalypha australis) is useful for distinguishing a common native plant from an introduced plant that has been showing up on an increasing number of sites across North America, and may have potential to be invasive.

Other random guides include:

• Annual Fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus) vs. Philadelphia Fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus)


• White Avens (Geum vernum) vs. Spring Avens (Geum vernum)


• Purpletop (Sorghum halepense) vs. Johnsongrass (Sorghum halepense)


• Wingstem (Verbesina occidentalis) vs. Yellow Crownbeard (Verbesina occidentalis)


• Norway Spruce (Picea orientalis) vs. Caucasian Spruce (Picea orientalis)

These guides are a mix of different types, two focusing on telling apart natives from invasives, some or distinguishing visually-similar and closely-related native plants, and the spruce guide primarily focusing on landscaping plants. And of course there are many other random guides under development!

Thank you for your interest and support!