Flora of the Pacific Northwest, 2nd Edition, published by the University of Washington Herbarium, Burke Museum in October 2018, provides users with dichotomous keys to 5,085 wild-growing Pacific Northwest native and introduced plant species, subspecies, and varieties. Flora 2nd edition also contains detailed botanical illustrations for 4,373 species. Publication of Flora 2nd edition has made the field and lab identification work of Washington state agency botanists significantly more efficient, and the ability to confidently identify a rare or invasive species on public lands supports land management goals.
WSDOT uses these resources to identify plants and plant communities subject to state and federal regulation, to document conditions before construction. It uses them to purchase appropriate native planting mixes for new right-of-way or for restoration purposes. It also uses them to identify invasive and noxious weed species along the state’s transportation assets that could affect adjoining land or agricultural areas.
The primary objective of this project was to expand the existing Flora 2nd edition website to include automatically updating distribution maps for all taxa in the book as new data become available at the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria. In addition, the project produced revised identifications keys for families, genera, and species that have undergone taxonomic changes or for which new taxa have been added since the book’s publication.
This project will allow Flora 2nd edition to be maintained as a “living” resource and will make it more usable and useful for public land managers such as WSDOT and other users, including the public.
WSDOT Webinar Wednesday presentation
Flora of the Pacific Northwest website
Principal Investigator: David E. Giblin, UW Herbarium, Burke Museum
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Tatiana Dreisbach
WSDOT Project Manager: Jon Peterson