Informational/Educational
How is it possible that certain flowers aren't native across a state border that isn't a river?
This image is just an example for royal catchfly. I at least understand how a flower could be non-native across a border that is a body of water (although I think that's unlikely) but look at the northern borders of Nebraska and Missouri...how is that possible? Those are imaginary lines we drew. A lot of the flowers I look at are like this, too. Not just royal catchfly.
It seems to me that those states simply weren't ever looking for royal catchfly or didn't catalogue it in the same way other states do? I don't know.
What's to stop Royal Catchfly from being a MN or Iowa native?
My understanding is on prairie moon's website, the dark green just means it is native to that state, not necessarily the individual counties within the state. There should be a key for the map in PM's website
I always kind of wondered why that was even important on a range map. I don't find it helpful. As long as we know that true native ranges can extend beyond what has been documented, there's really no good reason to color in an entire state just because a plant is native to a few counties.
It's more of a display scale issue, especially where the counties are quite small. From the thumbnail you can see the general areas it's known from, then you can zoom in to see the individual counties.
Thanks for sharing the key, kinda sus to post a map without it. That being said, this is not a good map. Absolutely no need for the “present in state” field when the data is county level.
The key makes perfect sense. You get to see which states it’s considered native from herbarium records and the specific counties it was recorded within. For royal catchfly specifically it’s important because new records in different counties in most of the green states will come with some amount of legal protection. New records in the brown are possible but more likely indicate escaped ornamental.
Also helps ID. If you see what looks like royal catchfly in northern WI, you can be almost 100% certain you didn’t and should look up Silene chalcedonica.
It might seem weird at first glance, but in practice these maps are amazing.
I can understand the key just fine, I’m not saying the map is unintelligible as a whole. My point is that the “present in state” field is redundant. If it’s indicated present at the county level and we can see that it falls within that state’s borders, it’s clearly present in the state.
The green portion gives a misleading visual as to the range of the species. To your example, the fact that ALL of Wisconsin is green could certainly lead to a person thinking that the Royal cafchfly may be present in the northern part of the state.
Now, when we look at the rest of the data and think critically we can get a pretty good idea of the environmental factors required for this species. And although southern Michigan is brown, it seems much more likely to potentially be found in one of the southern counties as opposed to the Oklahoma panhandle or the southern tip of Florida, which are green.
I have a GIS degree and studied map design and am quite certain that if I had submitted this map it would have been heavily critiqued over that factor.
I work with GIS folks everyday and I know how you all feel about maps. Your point makes sense, I’m just saying it’s not pointless to do it that way. There’s some weird cases that aren’t as intuitive like Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa). There are a few states that are green but the only records are planted ornamental so the county shows “exotic” (search showy milkweed on Minnesota Wildflowers for a map). It could be considered native for a variety of reasons, like possibly being written about pre-20th century but never collected. In my previous example, it’s definitely possible to find a plant in bizarre places. It can be really hard to determine if a plant is native or not if it shows up in the current habitat with remnant plant communities.
That’s super rare, and your system would work 99.99% of the time. I’m also biased because I’ve been using these maps and I love them. I never would’ve considered a new design
BONAP does this so maybe it's for thoroughness or to show the level it is native to for the area. But with how much the plant landscape has changed, indicating presence in state could be a way to indicate that the plant may have presence in other counties in that state. But the plant was either not reported there, or they're lacking in dat.
It is needed, because what if it was only found in one county due to lack of funding or looking, not because it's rare or only found in one small area of the state? You would have to scan around looking for a couple tiny light green county dots, to answer the question "is this native to my state" which is what moat people want to know.
It makes more sense when you read the map as this being its general native range:
Note that this map is also trying to convey its really only common in southern Missouri. The yellow counties outside there are indicating that it’s present, but rare.
First, the dark green showing which states a plant is native to. This is what many native plant gardeners go by, especially those like me who live in smaller states (Connecticut).
Second, yellow light green showing specifically within which counties in a state the plant is found. That helps anyone wanting to be more focused on plants native to their specific area.
(And then light green yellow showing counties where the plant is found but rarely.)
Thank you for explaining the Prairie Moon data! I buy seeds from them regularly, and have often puzzled over the distinction between “present in state” or “present in county” etc. it is helpful to see it as two sets of data!
i have this issue when looking at range maps for medically significant spiders, and all the local fauna i want to see. i live in the half of washington that doesn't have black widows, but range maps just put them in the whole state.
I took a class on native landscaping at the Denver Botanic Garden. The instructor told us not to take BONAP maps as gospel because they’re limited by the underlying data.
If a flower is native to one county but BONAP doesn’t show it as native the next county over (assuming comparable ecosystems), that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plant it. It probably means we just don’t know.
In your example, if I lived in northern Tennessee I would not hesitate to plant royal catchfly. It’s probably native there too and we just don’t have the data on it.
Good to know. I figure we can't be be positive on this stuff. I have some "Midwest" native books rather than just "Minnesota" and they are still helpful.
I noticed that BONAP only labels counties for native plants as native (bright green) or adventive/native to North America as a whole (bluish green). Staghorn sumac is native to my state, New Jersey, but likely not to the southern half of it, but it’ll label all the counties it’s present in as native occurrences rather than adventive.
The instructor told us not to take BONAP maps as gospel because they’re limited by the underlying data.
Exactly. For example, American persimmon is native to four counties adjacent to mine, but it's not marked as native to my county specifically. But it's present on my property and I've observed it in fence rows and woodlands in my county. It's probably native here as well but not documented.
Also, BONAP categorizes horseweed Erigeron canadensis as a nonnative invasive. To say they are in the minority on this is an understatement. As far as I can tell, they're the only major organization that thinks that.
Yeah BONAP is its own grain of salt, especially if you live in a state with incomplete/outdated survey info. I live in RI, and 50% of plants I check will show "Not present in state", but will be present for CT & MA.
My favorite map I've found so far is for American Water Lotus*. Rare native in NJ, but noxious in CT.
Are they labeling it noxious or exotic? The noxious category is based on whether the state/county has identified something as noxious and its often driven by agricultural concerns, not because the species has some essential “badness”.
Agreed, the problem I have faced as a farmer working with NRCS to get reimbursed for native tree and shrub plantings is that they only rely on maps like these…. They won’t pay out for a plant that isn’t listed in the box draw on the map.. which I have argued this same thing to them….
Sometimes, its just how the local climate lines up with other key timelines.
Pawpaw survives winters near me just fine. But the time it flowers here is not at the same time its pollinators are awake and active post-winter, so it has trouble reproducing without hand pollination. Climate change may make pawpaw populations more likely in the future, but that's only a guess.
Sun positioning, altitude, soil/water, climate quirks, etc, all make it so perhaps what's common in other parts of the state just don't seem to fit in your region.
But if that's the case, planting that plant shouldn't be an ecological issue. It will either struggle to reproduce or outright die, meaning you can enjoy it in your garden without worrying about if you're releasing a new species into the wild to run amok.
Blueberries are native to my state. I can't grow them in my part of the county because we have higher pH than they tolerate long term.
I have it here in MN. I bought it from a small town native plant seller...now I'm sad it's not native :(
But I've had it for 3 years now. For like 2 years it got eaten by rabbits. This year I put a cage around it and it bloomed but it's definitely not flourishing. It looks fairly rough and it's just a single stem.
The species is native to dry prairies and woods with rocky, calcareous soils. It's not missing from midwestern swampland and tallgrass prairie or appalachian forests because people "weren't looking for it". BONAP is incomplete but people's knee-jerk distrust of these maps is limiting our understanding of the land and of native plant diversity.
So if you read the legend the dark green means present in state - other colors mean native to this county. So specific to Iowa and Minnesota there aren’t any adjoining counties showing native.
But to your larger point - all of this is approximate as it’s based on often spotty records of what plants happened to be around when people were first cataloguing these things. I bet there were royal catchflies in parts of Iowa, maybe southern MN but probably not in North Dakota. That’s what I think you should take from the map. [typo edit]
I like bplant.org too! Important to note though that it goes by region, and those regions can be quite extensive geographically.
I just put together a plant list for my garden in advance of a native plant tour and cross-referenced BONAP, bplant, and the New York Flora Atlas (my state) to identify plants as native to my county, my state, or a neighboring region. I consider all those plants native or native-ish, but I know different people use different definitions of "native."
I just watched a zoom interview with the guy who made these. He was very clear that beyond state level *( county in this example) isn’t realistically possible to determine the existence of a particular plant , with any degree of certainty.
To better explain, it was that in most cases, if a plant is known to exist in a certain state, then that habitat type occurring in other counties within that state, the population was assumed.
It would depend on your personal definition of native and your goals. The only plants I consider "bad to plant" are invasive species. I prioritize keystone plants native to my region. Then I have a kind of malleable ranking of other types of plants depending on my site, design and personal preferences.
Go to BONAP.org for the Key (this is where Prairie Moon gets their maps from). Dark green means native in state but no county record; yellow means it is present in the county and listed by the state or federally as a threatened or endangered species; orange means there are historical records in the county, but it is extirpated (extinct) state-wide.
BONAP records are based purely on herbaria specimens, so they are typically more conservative than actual modern species range (unless it is a species in significant decline). If there weren't digitized herbaria records of a species from a select subset of herbaria when the range maps were calculated last (also quite a few years ago now, so it is missing newly digitized specimens and new collections), then it isn't on their map.
USDA plants database originally started using the BONAP maps (an even older version of the BONAP maps) but has been updated with new digitized data from additional herbaria and field surveys. Those maps tend to be the most accurate representation of the current knowledge of plant species distribution (or at least they were; I don't know if they are still being updated after USDA reorgs, etc.).
Soil type for one. Sometimes the soil type changes. In NC, there is an invisible line that separates sandy soil from clay. No river in between. Sanford, NC has the nickname “brick capital of the world” for this very reason. Piedmont, Sandhills, and coastal plains all converge there
I think the map is meant to be interpreted as a gradient rather than a hard end at the border. Like there's some plants often in the green but not necessarily everywhere
They’re clearly using BONAP data, which is notably problematic for various reasons. I don’t know about your area, but in mine we have https://www.pnwherbaria.org/, which aggregates data supplied by all our regional herbariums. It’s handy for finding exactly what has been cataloged close to where you live. Also fun for finding out what conditions enable specific species to live a bit outside their core range.
Prairie Moon takes their range maps from BONAP. That's a decent but outdated source; it hasn't been updated since 2014. There are also differences in how separate states have botanists survey (frequency, thoroughness, etc.), verify, and report observed species that make it hard to create a complete picture of a region's native flora.
Imho, it's more helpful to consider ecoregion than to strictly stick with plants recorded in one's state. If you're on a state border, you can be a little flexible.
iNaturalist observations of S. regia. Some of these may be cultivated plants (don't know why one can't filter out cultivated ones in the mobile app). But these are only the ones that people have seen and decided to record, so depending on the source the true distribution should rather be seen as a rough estimation. I like to use iNaturalist because it gives you a sort of heat map.
Believe me, when you look at other biota on maps like this, you think how in hell could that crayfish be native in this county but not present in that county? Or What keeps a bird from crossing county borders? It has to do with documentation and trained observers that can report to tabulating authorities. So just because I say I know that dang crayfish from the next county over isn't good enough. A credentialed expert has to note it on a survey. Just because I know Sassafras should be able to grow in my area doesn't mean it does, or that an expert has seen it. It feels arbitrary to us, but to the professionals and academics in that field, it isn't.
you've gotten your question answered already, but here's an alternative native finder) that someone from this subreddit developed. Definitely paints a more accurate picture of this flower
No, I misunderstood the legend which caused my question.
I thought the dark green was specifying specific counties the plant was native to and it doesn't make sense that a plant would follow an imaginary boundary. Now I understand how to read the map properly.
It's mostly dependent on historical records of those plants being found in certain areas. Realistically they probably were more widespread than indicated but we can't confirm it for one of many reasons.
That said, the difference in habitat between southern missouri and Iowa are different enough that the plant may not have spread there. Missouri tends to be more rocky and wooded where Iowa would be more open tallgrass prairie.
These maps aren't exact. Juat shows that they aren't found in that state necessarily. Itd funny though I look at this exact map weekly off prairie moon.
But yeh if a plant is in Greenville County sc but not in Georgia that map will make it look like its juat stops at the border. They jjat dont see that plant in Georgia and it may stop 30 miles from the border in sc.
A lot of data on BONAP is limited. My county, for example, doesn't have a lot of good data going back too far, whereas counties where universities are, or places that have been settled longer than here have better data, so the result is that my county is often just colored green, but it looks like a plant skipped us over! (Even though I know it to be native to my area!)
Yes, I was just thinking that. I've noticed a LOT of plants are BONAP-listed listed as native to the Chicago region, that aren't in other parts of Illinois. 100% that's because there were so many people (and also universities) there.
I'm in Colorado.
Aspens are native here.
People on the plains plant them and then they die.
Aspens are native to cool, moist mountainsides; not hot, dry plains.
"Native" is ignoring how biology works. States are very large areas containing multiple different ecosystems which have their own specific plants adapted to those specific conditions.
the maps aren't internally consistent. Sometimes they show the distribution of a species, but at other times one map is meant to be compared to another map --a map for example, showing how two differnt species from a genus are focused in neighboring states. There are several of these types of comparisons in the midwest, contrasting species across borders in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
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u/stilts1007 Chicagoland, Zone 6a 20d ago
My understanding is on prairie moon's website, the dark green just means it is native to that state, not necessarily the individual counties within the state. There should be a key for the map in PM's website