Thank you to all of you who have contributed observations of plants in San Diego County to iNaturalist. The San Diego County Plant Atlas Project on iNaturalist was created five years ago and now has over half a million observations. About 125,000 plant observations were contributed during the 2021 calendar year. Larry Hendrickson’s observation of Leafless Wintergreen (Pyrola aphylla) https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/84370547 was among the observations posted on June 23, 2021, the day the number of observations surpassed 500,000!

Leafless Wintergreen by @larryhendrickson

Your contributions to the Plant Atlas Project on iNat are helping to improve the overall knowledge of the flora of San Diego County. To ensure that your data can be used for scientific purposes, be sure to join the San Diego County Plant Atlas Project on iNat (if you haven’t already) and change your settings to allow project curators to have access to obscured coordinates no matter who adds the observation to the project.

We are all very fortunate that Dr. Jon Rebman reviews our contributions to the project and provides expert identifications for as many observations as he can. You can optimize the likelihood that he will be able to identify your observations by following the guidance provided in the iNaturalist photo guide available on the San Diego Natural History Museum’s Plant Atlas website where you will also find a wealth of information about plants in our region.

Even during a global pandemic, the San Diego County Plant Atlas Project on iNat had a good year in 2021! Let’s make 2022 an even better year by continuing to submit plant observations to iNat, making sure our settings allow curators access to obscured coordinates, and following the best practices set forth in the photo guide. Happy New Year!