New York City EcoFlora

Brian Boom, Daniel Atha and collaborators

The New York City EcoFlora project is designed to serve two complimentary purposes: (1) to meaningfully engage New Yorkers in protecting and preserving the City’s native plant species, and (2) to assemble new, original observations and data on the City’s flora to better inform policy decisions about management and conservation of the City’s natural resources. The metropolitan area is home to a significant diversity of plants, animals, fungi, and habitats that provide such vital ecosystem services as cleaning the air and filtering the water. But this biodiversity is under increasing threat by development, invasive species, and a changing climate.

The project, in the prototyping phase through 2017, seeks to engage the public as citizen scientists to observe, collect, and compile information about the City’s plants and their relationships with other organisms, such as birds, insects, and mushrooms, and combine these data with all that is already known from natural history collections and scientific publications. The New York City EcoFlora will be a real-time, online, ongoing checklist of plants—the first ever to connect plants in the web of life in New York City—that will result in a dynamic resource for conservation planning as well as in New Yorkers that are better informed about the importance of urban ecologies and who can contribute to protecting them.

This map is a prototype for the New York City EcoFlora project, and it depicts data for thirty test species. Red markers indicate specimen-based records from the NYBG’s Steere Herbarium; blue markers indicate observational records by citizen scientists from the iNaturalist website. If you have comments about the map or to offer suggestions, please contact Daniel Atha (datha@nybg.org).

More information:
Press release: NYBG’s Center for Conservation Strategy Launches New York City EcoFlora Project
The Riverdale Press Article: Present (Almost) at Creation
Species list: Preliminary Checklist of the Vascular Plants of New York City
Related project: Flora of Central Park
Get involved: NYBG Citizen Science

Presentations for volunteers:
Project orientation: New York City EcoFlora
Project resource: Information on using iNaturalist