New York Flora Association Blog

CLICK HERE for an interesting website on the identification of maples on Long Island.

What species are these?

The New England Wildflower Society is developing a new website called Go Botany which has interesting features about the botany of New England (and useful for New York too because our floras are similar).  The photo below shows the features it plans to include.

One of the features, Plant Identifier, is ready to use and provides a sequence of photos to help identify a plant.  The photo below shows part of the opening page for identification.

The key is a random access key using photos and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, depending on the characters used and the quality of the photo.  See what you think.  For access to the plant key CLICK HERE.

Gerry Rising, a professor emeritus from SUNY Buffalo, writes a weekly nature column for the Buffalo News in the Sunday Science section.  Many of those columns are about the plants of Western New York and fortunately they can be accessed on his Nature Watch web site. For a list of the botanical articles CLICK HERE.

CLICK HERE for more information on this new book about the history of the Hudson River Valley.  It includes 3 chapters on native vegetation:

10. Vegetation Dynamics in the Northern Shawangunk Mountains: The Last Three Hundred Years
John E. Thompson and Paul C. Huth

12. Ecology in the Field of Time: Two Centuries of interaction between Agriculture and Native Species in Columbia County, New York
Conrad Vispo and Claudia Knab-Vispo

13. The Introduction and Naturalization of Exotic Ornamental Plants in New York’s Hudson River Valley
Chelsea Teale

The Natural Heritage Conservation Guides are an important resource for information on rare species and natural communities in New York. Back in the spring the server that housed the information was hacked and damaged beyond repair. It has taken months to reconstruct the database and find a new server that would handle the guides. Through the tireless work of database manager Dave Marston, with assistance from other staff members, the guides are now back online. The basic information is there but there are some things still missing that have to be updated. The first page of a guide has a warning message that needs to be removed, photographs and maps need to be restored, a link to making PDFs doesn’t work yet, and advanced searches still needs to be fixed. This will take a few more weeks but most of the important information is there. These guides receive thousands of hits every month and we’re glad that they are available again. We use them a lot too! – Steve Young

A screen shot of the plant guides list. You can also organize the plants by scientific name.

The new Michigan Flora Online website is available for all vascular plants with keys to families, genera and species. Under each species is a county map, discussion and photos. It includes the new family treatment of the ferns and fern allies so take a look at the changes and compare them to New York. There are also lots of other features which I will let you find for yourself. Happy clicking! – Steve Young

A sample page from the Flora.

Art Gilman created a Botrychium Key for the NYFA Botrychium workshop in June. You can access the key by CLICKING HERE. We need more information on this group of ferns for New York so we hope you can get out in the field and use this key.

We hope you can find more Botrychiums like this B. dissectum from Broome Co. Photo Kim Smith.

These two sites from Michael Rosenthal include some distribution info (Flora of Vermont) and nice photos (both sites) of our ferns and fern allies. Click on the links below.

Fern Flora of Vermont

Ferns of Eastern North America