What Grows Here? You define the "here"

Just rec'd this today and it looks like it could be very useful.

A New Calflora Feature: What Grows Here?

November 8, 2007

Dear Friend of Calflora,

After over a year of planning and work, Calflora is delighted to announce a new feature: What Grows Here?
The goal of What Grows Here? is to make it as easy and intuitive to find a list of plants that grow in an area ("Here"), as it has always been to find areas where a plant grows.

It's easy to start here and define "here" as a:

* Town
* Zip Code
* County
* Watershed (Using the CalWater watersheds)
* Park
* Named Location (from a huge databse of place names)
* Quad (7.5-minute USGS map name or number)

You can read more about all of these options on the WHG? Overview page.

Or just skip directly to the WGH? page to pick a spot on a map (it helps if you click "I will pick a location on a map" on this page and specify a county first).

Once you're on the map page, you can zoom in and out, switch from feature to feature (use the pop-up above the left of the map to switch, for example, from watersheds to zip codes or quads), drag the map's center star to move the map, hover your mouse over a region on the map to view its name in a tool-tip, and so on.

Then when you've got "here" in the map, click the "Find Plants" button at the lower left of the map to view an illustrated table of the plants Calflora's data contributers have records for, for the area shown on the map (or click "within selected quad/watershed/zip code/etc." to restrict the list to just the region selected in the list). As an example, here's the result of a query for native perennials found in the Lower Russian River watershed (Sonoma County), with photographs.

The full breadth of the Calflora you're already familiar with is available to you by clicking information in the table of results or on the colored observation dots on the map.

That this is a brand new feature! We need your help to identify ways to make it work better for you. Please report any bugs, tell us how to make the service work better, or suggest new kinds of ways to define "here." We want to hear from you.

Remember that Calflora's two-part mission is to:

* Assemble the broadest possible collection of information about California's wild plants
* Make the collection accessible to the widest possible audience

In an effort to make Calflora's library of plant information more available, we've been making it easier to get to Calflora resources without having to log in, and have seen an explosion in use: We've averaged over 30,000 page views a day in the past few months! The inevitable drop in registration means we are more dependent than ever on your generosity to keep Calflora alive and flourishing. Please consider making a donation to Calflora: The Calflora Donation Page makes it easy to help, using a credit card, PayPal, or by check.

The WGH? project was funded by the generosity of the JiJi Foundation, the San Francisco Estuary Foundation, a major anonymous donor, and the support of professional subscribers and donors. Please join us in thanking these great folks for making WGH? possible.

Sincerely,

The Calflora Volunteers
email: news@calflora.org
web: http://www.calflora.org

I got the same thing--haven't had time to play with it yet but it sounds really cool!

Very fun feature. Now if we could just find some of these in the nurseries.