Using Biota of North America

This insanely large plant database is mostly the work of one single person (John Kartesz) plugging away for several decades.  The database has attempted to collect all plant lists from all states and counties.  This includes all the museum and herbarium specimens collected over the past couple hundred years.  The database is not complete, but it’s getting more complete all the time.  There’s a backlog of lists to be entered, so if a list is not up there, let me know and I can check with Dr. Kartesz to see if they’ve got it. 

NOTE (2/15/11): Biota of North America is currently only working with the Mozilla Firefox browser.  You will need to download Firefox to your computer in order to use the site.  Sorry about any inconvenience.

Using Bonap to Get Species Lists

1) From the BONAP entry page, find the link for North American Digital Flora about half the way down.  This will take you to a query page where you can look for plant lists.  The Digital Flora website is built to work with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.  It’s mostly functional with Firefox, but it did give me some problems moving backwards and forwards.  

AS YOU ENTER THE SITE, YOU’RE SAFE TO DISREGARD SECURITY WARNINGS (“CERTIFICATE ERRORS”) FROM YOUR BROWSER.  The Digital Flora is on a Military Website (Army Corps of Engineers), and the security warning just comes from the way these sites interact with your browser.  Click on “Continue to this Website” even if it recommends against this.

2) You should come to a page with a set of query options at the left and a map at the right.  Note that above the map, you get something like: 

Species Selected: 8558, Species + Infraspecific: 11834, Genera: 2017

8558 is the number of species it has for North America.  11834 includes subspecies as well, and 2017 is the number of genera.  WE’LL ALWAYS USE THE FIRST NUMBER OF THE THREE – I.E. THE NUMBER OF SPECIES.

3) Now you can narrow the query to look for the species list that you want.  For example, let’s say we’d like to get the list of exotic species in Amherst County, Virginia.

We don’t need to use the upper “Nomenclature Query” box – this would help us search the database by plant name, but we want to search by geographic location.

4) The middle “Attribute Query” helps us narrow the set of plants we want to look for.  Use the Nativity box to switch between Native and Exotic plants.  For now, Click “Exotic” to get the number of exotic species.

5) Now go to the bottom “Geographic Query” box and provide the location.  To search for a County by name, click on the arrow and put “Place Name or Zip Code” into the search box.  When the text entry box opens, type in: Amherst County, VA and click “Enter.”

6) Now you should see what you want.  Notice that the location of the county comes up in the map at the right – always check this to make sure it has picked up the right area.  The Query Selection Summary says 125 species – this is the exotic richness for the county.

7) If you click on the red Accept Query button on the top, you can see the full list of plants.

8) Now change “Amherst County, VA” in the Geographic Query to “Amherst County” and hit enter.  Now, the system gives you the city of Amherst Massachusetts and list for the county that Amherst is in (Hampshire County).  Two important lessons: 1) always type the full name of the county, 2) always check the map to make sure it’s the right place