Wyoming Native Plant Society helps liberate Plant Names for Creative Re-use

What's your pleasure?

Let’s say you’re writing an article about a plant, or your local flora, or a pioneering botanist. Now … close your eyes and imagine you’re in a huge library dedicated exclusively to biodiversity, with 200,000+ holdings (many rare) scattered across the globe. Next, imagine giving the name of your plant or botanist to a “librarian” who then piles all relevant books, articles, field notes, correspondence, etc., on your desk almost instantaneously! In fact, this library is not imaginary. It’s quite real, though in a virtual kind of way. It’s the Biodiversity Heritage Library—headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, but easily accessible from your office, home, or favorite coffee house.

I discovered the BHL in 2014, while putting together a post about the history of the lanceleaf cottonwood (Populus acuminata). BHL soon became my go-to site for information about botanical exploration of the American West. What I like most is the quick easy access to lots of useful information. Documents that were difficult to access or even unavailable only a few years ago are now just a search and a click away.

Per Axel Rydberg’s Populus acuminata. From American Black Cottonwoods, 1893; BHL.

Edwin James’s Jamesia. From Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1875; BHL.

Fossilized palm frond (Powell palmetto perhaps?) collected near Rock Springs, Wyoming. From JS Newberry’s The later extinct floras of North America, 1898; BHL.

The BHL is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that are digitizing legacy biodiversity literature, making it easily accessible as part of a global “biodiversity commons.” Much of this literature has been available only in select libraries, mainly in the developed world, making limited access a major obstacle—for example in research, conservation and education. Providing it online free-of-charge is a radical and exciting change. “Free global access to digital literature repatriates information about the earth’s species to all parts of the world.”

Put another way, BHL is making biodiversity literature “freely accessible to a global audience … thereby liberating taxonomic names and bibliographic data associated with the content for creative re-use.” Among the plant names most recently liberated were those in our very own Castilleja, the newsletter of the Wyoming Native Plant Society.

In October 1994, the Wyoming Native Plant Society newsletter was given a name: Castilleja.

It all started last October when the BHL blog featured a post titled A Local Focus: The Native Plant Societies of the US. When I read that native plant society newsletters were being added to the collection, I contacted Project Investigator Susan Fraser at The New York Botanical Garden, asking if Castilleja were part of the plan. Indeed it was. “We would be thrilled to include Castilleja in the project,” she replied.

Incorporating native plant society newsletters into the BHL is part of Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature—a two-year project designed to “preserve and provide access to small natural history and botanical collections and publications.” It’s conducted by the New York Botanical Garden in partnership with Harvard University, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

“We are grateful to the native plant societies who have generously shared their local expertise by making their newsletters available to researchers through BHL. In addition to the biodiversity information they contain, these publications are a wonderful snapshot of the small, dedicated groups of people working all over the U.S. to document and preserve our native plants.” –Patrick Randall, Community Manager, Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature; Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University

Before Castilleja issues could be processed, a permissions form had to be signed (the society President took care of this). Fortunately, PDFs were available for all issues; these were transmitted en masse to BHL. Then the techies worked their magic. Now, whenever someone searches BHL for Boechera pusilla or Yermo xanthocephalus, for example, relevant issues of Castilleja appear on the results list. We’ve hit the big time!

The image below shows one result from a BHL search for “yermo xanthocephalus”—the desert yellowhead, endemic to Wyoming. As I scrolled through Castilleja Volume 17 Number 4 (1998), scientific names on each page appeared in the box on the lower left. Note that contents can be printed or downloaded (either the entire work or selected pages). I’ve used the latter option many times. Usually the pages arrive well within the hour, whether from the newsletter of a neighboring native plant society, or from a rare old book in a library thousands of miles away.

How did BHL manage to find yermo among the 51,749,439 pages held in the collection? It was magic!!! No, not really … sorry. But it’s just as cool as magic. As texts are processed, scientific names are extracted from each page using Global Names Recognition and Discovery (GNRD), a taxonomic name recognition algorithm. GNRD provides an open and global-names-based infrastructure to index, organize and manage biodiversity data. Like BHL, GNRD aims for easy public access, with the goal of spurring widespread and innovative use of biodiversity data. A noble goal indeed!

So if you’re in need of biodiversity literature, especially if it’s old or rare or otherwise difficult to access, pay a visit to the BHL. Adventure and discovery start here. And if you’re looking for a good time, browse the always-interesting BHL blog (warning: you'd better have plenty of time on your hands).

Above, Coffea arabica was the first coffee species to be cultivated, and still accounts for most of world's coffee production (from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen; see The Berry that Changed the World). Below, Miss C.H. Lippincott Flower Seeds catalog cover (1900), from Leading Ladies in the World of Seeds (you can view over 11,000 seed and nursery catalogs in the BHL collection!).

Dreaming of Online Plants

This lupine in Santa Barbara County has been immortalized as iNat Observation 569966.

What if you were a nature geek planning a vacation, and you found a website about the wildflowers of your destination area with photos, dates of observation, places to see them, and even an app for identification?  How cool would that be?!!

Plants of Santa Barbara County, California; arrow points to location of lupine in top photo.
[Click on all images to view details.]

It would be very cool, and in fact such websites are already out there.  Problem is -- the data are sparse, even in California where I went a few weeks ago.  But there are things we can do to change that.

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I used to dream of compiling a book about the native plants of my home territory, with keys and photos for identification.  But devoting huge amounts of time, effort, and attention to detail before seeing any results isn't for me, and lining up and financing publication always seemed daunting.  However now that I'm living in the digital age, the dream has been resurrected.  Online I can “publish” as I go, instead of waiting until I’ve addressed many hundreds of species.  Others can help by contributing observations.  And it will cost almost nothing.  Sounds doable!

In fact, I’ve already started.  Right now I’m checking out websites and apps (if you have recommendations, I'd love to hear).  I read about iNaturalist several weeks ago in a post at The Dipper Ranch.  It looked promising so I gave it a test during my vacation on the Central California Coast.  Before I left home, I searched for plant observations in Santa Barbara County (above).  Then I entered my own from a hike on the Point Sal Road.

We used to drive the family station wagon to Point Sal on this road!

Point Sal beach from near "the pass" -- about halfway to the beach (5 miles one-way).

First I created an iNaturalist account.  I was able to sign in with my Google account; Twitter, Facebook and others work too.  Next I entered observations -- plant name, location, date, photos, description and more.  It all seemed intuitive and easy.

Fuschia-flowered gooseberry, Ribes speciosum (iNat observation).

Description:  "Low shrub growing with Toxicodendron diversilobum on slope just below road."

Identification can be to any level -- family, genus, species, common name, or even just “plant”.  Accepted names are available from drop-down lists, and there’s a box to check if you’d like some help:

Request for identification assistance, highlighted in yellow (iNat Observation).

Location can be as precise as you like.  You can enter coordinates or click on a Google Map.  For this outing, I mapped all observations to a single location about halfway between the trailhead and “the pass” (they were all north of the pass).

The "trail" to Point Sal beach is a narrow winding old road that's now closed to vehicles.

Photos can be uploaded directly, or you can link to other image hosting sites.  You can include multiple images per observation.

Flowers of poison oak, Toxicodendron diversilobum (iNat observation) ...

... and the despised leaves that cause itching and inflammation in most people.

It was easy to enter multiple observations for a single location with the Copy option.  It’s also possible to Batch-process and Import.  By the time I was done, I had added six observations from California to my single observation from Wyoming (the tree I’m following):

My first iNaturalist observations.

Searching

iNaturalist has good search tools for investigating the natural history of an area.  You can use text fields or a map.  Results are displayed as photos, text, or even hierarchically for those who are taxonomically-inclined.

iNaturalist search fields.

Projects

One thing that really excites me is the Projects option.  “Projects are a way to pool your observations with other people on iNat. Whether you're interested in starting a citizen science project or just keeping tabs on the birds in a nearby park with your local birding club, Projects are the way to go.”  Here's a nice example -- the More Mesa Natural Resources project near Santa Barbara, California.

More Mesa home page.

Output from the More Mesa project.  It currently includes 369 observations.

I hope there will be a "Plants of the Laramie Mountains" project soon, where anyone can share their observations.  We'll be able to see what's blooming, what's new, and of course debate identification -- a popular sport among botanists.  Folks new to the area can get to know our local plants, once we’ve added enough observations.

The only iNat plant observation in southeast Wyoming currently is my cottonwood (green arrow).

This caveat applies not just to iNaturalist but to citizen science in general -- scientific research conducted by amateur or nonprofessional scientists as well as professionals, often by crowdsourcing.  The usefulness of citizen science projects depends on participation; many are still in their infancy so data are sparse.  But surely at least some will grow to maturity, for why wouldn't naturalists want to contribute?  It's great to be able to share, debate, modify and continually update information ... to “record what [we] see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world” (iNaturalist).

Here's a video featuring one such nature lover, Sonny Riddell, who demonstrates moth-collecting and citizen science.  I’m very glad to have “met” Sonny.  He's a great role model. His enthusiasm is contagious, and he reminds me how much fun it is when we really focus on what we enjoy.  You can learn more at SPRING AND MOTHS WHEN YOU ARE EIGHT YEARS OLD

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How about you?  Do you use iNaturalist?  What do you think of it?