About this catalogue

432 plants, 1138 animals with documented plant relationships, 7574 relationships between them, and 21 searchable fields. Built for Alberta and the Canadian prairies.

What it is

A reference to the native plants of Alberta and the Canadian prairies, and the animals that depend on them. It is the catalogue behind Site & Pattern, a desktop application for designing landscapes with native plants: lawn-to-habitat conversion, pollinator gardens and ecological restoration. Site & Pattern does the site analysis, the design and the planting plan; these pages are its catalogue, published so you can read it without installing anything.

What it is honest about

• Unknowns stay unknown. A species with no recorded bloom window appears under no month. A plant with no recorded flower colour appears under no colour. Absence of a record is never rendered as a fact.
• Evidence travels with the claim. Recorded ranges carry their occurrence counts and a confidence band. A region derived from three records is not presented like one derived from three hundred.
• Relationships are documented, not inferred. Every animal listed on a plant page comes from a sourced record.
• Grasses and sedges are not yellow. They are wind-pollinated and have no showy flower, so they get a bucket that says so.
• Photographs are credited or absent. 321 of 432 species have an openly-licensed photograph we can attribute. The rest show none.
• The region outlines are surveyed. They come from the National Ecological Framework for Canada v2.2, simplified to about 900 m for display, so an outline is accurate to roughly a kilometre rather than to the metre. Until recently they were hand-traced and this page said so.

What it does not contain

No Indigenous ecological knowledge, plant-use tradition, land-management practice or design framework appears in this catalogue, and none should be inferred from it. That knowledge is held by the communities it belongs to and is theirs to share on their own terms, through relationship rather than extraction.

Two things follow from that and are worth stating plainly, because both are deliberate omissions rather than gaps. The underlying dataset has a free-text notes field in which some entries describe traditional medicinal use; it is withheld from these pages. The dataset also tags some species with a generic medicinal use category; that tag is not published or searchable here either. Putting a public, indexed index of medicinal native plants on the web would operationalize knowledge that was never ours to publish. The horticultural facts those notes also carried, such as how a plant spreads, whether it is toxic and where to buy it, are recorded in structured fields and do appear.

Where this data came from

These are the works the data cites. Their bibliographic details were transcribed from the source records and have not been checked against the works themselves, and no one has verified that a given work supports every claim citing it, this tells you where a claim came from, not that it has been confirmed.

Published works (25)

• Acorn, J. Bugs of Alberta. Lone Pine Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta.
• Acorn, J. and Sheldon, I. (2006). Butterflies of Alberta. Lone Pine Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta.
• Barrett, S. C. H., and K. Helenurm. 1987. The Reproductive-Biology of Boreal Forest Herbs.1. Breeding Systems and Pollination. Canadian Journal of Botany 65:2036-2046.
• Bird, C.D., Hilchie, G.J., Kondla, N.G., Pike, E.M. and Sperling, F.A.H. (1995). Alberta Butterflies. Provincial Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
• Clements, R. E., and F. L. Long. 1923, Experimental pollination. An outline of the ecology of flowers and insects. Washington, D.C., USA, Carnegie Institute of Washington.
• Clint Otto, Russ Bryant, and Ned H. Euliss Jr., 2020, The U.S. Geological Survey Pollinator Library Dataset: U.S. Geological Survey. https://doi.org/10.5066/P9DSS3VL. Accessed at <https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/file/get/5f076d2082ce21d4c3fb7426?f=__disk__c5%2F05%2Fa4%2Fc505a40f8b320c4d1444ba286d4e7ec1143390a9> on 31 Jul 2026.
• Dorey, J.B., Fischer, E.E., Chesshire, P.R. et al. A globally synthesised and flagged bee occurrence dataset and cleaning workflow. Sci Data 10, 747 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02626-w. Accessed at <https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/dorey2023/archive/ee2f9f138a5c4464fc8edc69c39507d20fe4a0f4.zip> on 01 Aug 2026.2014.
• Fricke, E.C., Svenning, J. Accelerating homogenization of the global plant–frugivore meta-network. Nature 585, 74–78 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2640-y. Accessed at <https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/fricke2020/archive/a104a34d91a6267efdc0660ff45ca7783cfc8b20.zip> on 01 Aug 2026.Prather 2000.
• Guzman, Laura Melissa; Kelly, Tyler; Elle, Elizabeth, 2022, "A dataset for pollinator diversity and their interactions with plants in the Pacific NorthWest", https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/WTEZNH, Borealis, V1. Accessed at <https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/guzman2022/archive/e24f70b4a435156264c45a853b4a58687df4cdfc.zip> on 31 Jul 2026.
• hurlbertlab/dietdatabaseMcGowan, J. D. 1973. Fall and Winter Foods of Ruffed Grouse in Interior Alaska. The Auk 90: 636-640.
• hurlbertlab/dietdatabaseTheberge, J. B. and G. C. West. 1973. Significance of Brooding to the Energy Demands of Alaskan Rock Ptarmigan Chicks. The Arctic Journal of the Arctic Institude of North America 26: 138-148.
• hurlbertlab/dietdatabaseWeeden, R. B. 1967. Seasonal and geographic variation in the foods of adult White-tailed Ptarmigan. Condor 69:303-309.
• hurlbertlab/dietdatabaseWest, G. C. and M. S. Meng. 1966. Nutrition of Willow Ptarmigan in northern Alaska. Auk 83:603-615.
• LaManna, JA, Burkle, LA, Belote, RT, Myers, JA. Biotic and abiotic drivers of plant–pollinator community assembly across wildfire gradients. J Ecol. 2020; 00: 1– 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13530 . Accessed at <https://github.com/globalbioticinteractions/lamanna2020/archive/f8f0791ae6261bf65eee5156413c5c3a370a4359.zip> on 31 Jul 2026.
• millerse/Pollination-CollectionAlarcón, R., Waser, N.M. and Ollerton, J., 2008. Year‐to‐year variation in the topology of a plant–pollinator interaction network. Oikos, 117(12), pp.1796-1807.
• millerse/Pollination-CollectionBauer, P.J., 1983. Bumblebee pollination relationships on the Beartooth Plateau tundra of southern Montana. American Journal of Botany, pp.134-144.
• Oppenheimer, R. L., and Lill, J. T. (2021). A Plant-Bee Visitation Network for Plummers Island, MD. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 123(2): 365-381.
• Pattie, D. and Fisher, C. Mammals of Alberta. Lone Pine Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta.
• Pohl, G.R., Anweiler, G.G., Schmidt, B.C. and Kondla, N.G. (2010). An annotated list of the Lepidoptera of Alberta, Canada. in ZooKeys.
• Pohl, G.R., Landry, J.-F., Schmidt, B.C., Lafontaine, J.D., Troubridge, J.T., Macaulay, A.D., van Nieukerken, E.J., deWaard, J.R., Dombroskie, J.J., Klymko, J., Nazari, V. and Stead, K. (2018). Annotated Checklist of the Moths and Butterflies (Lepidoptera) of Canada and Alaska. Pensoft Publishers.
• Robertson, C. 1929. Flowers and insects: lists of visitors to four hundred and fifty-three flowers. Carlinville, IL, USA, C. Robertson.
• Sheffield, C.S., Frier, S.D. and Dumesh, S. (2014). The bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea, Apiformes) of the Prairies Ecozone, with comparisons to other grasslands of Canada. in Arthropods of Canadian Grasslands. Biological Survey of Canada.
• Small, E. 1976. Insect pollinators of the Mer Bleue peat bog of Ottawa. Canadian Field Naturalist 90:22-28.
• University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Insect Division. Full Database Export 2020-11-20 provided by Erika Tucker and Barry Oconner. Accessed at <https://github.com/EMTuckerLab/ummzi/archive/6731357a377e9c2748fc931faa2ff3dc0ce3ea7a.zip> on 31 Jul 2026.https://doi.org/10.15468/tmxd7n.
• Wilson, J.S. and Carril, O.M. (2015). The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America's Bees. Princeton University Press.

Databases and specimen collections (88)

Occurrence and interaction records exported from a collection or an aggregator. A record here means somebody observed the animal on the plant and filed it; it is not a paper arguing the relationship matters.

• Alberta Native Bee Council. Alberta native bee compilation.
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Birds of the World. Cornell Lab of Ornithology. https://birdsoftheworld.org/.
• GBIF dataset 03fec74b-695e-4de5-bbe6-ae735fe4ab31. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/03fec74b-695e-4de5-bbe6-ae735fe4ab31.
• GBIF dataset 26255917-adf2-4cc3-853e-94dd1bc27b8d. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/26255917-adf2-4cc3-853e-94dd1bc27b8d.
• GBIF dataset 58d3f169-9b29-45b6-afd4-bc5ad6a13b0e. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/58d3f169-9b29-45b6-afd4-bc5ad6a13b0e.
• GBIF dataset 6e1ef328-8dc0-4366-a79f-93d5c34a5b34. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/6e1ef328-8dc0-4366-a79f-93d5c34a5b34.
• GBIF dataset 9c3f2c77-7980-4e76-86a9-525221c85074. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/9c3f2c77-7980-4e76-86a9-525221c85074.
• GBIF dataset acf0d7d1-d84c-4148-a208-2882fee74aab. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/acf0d7d1-d84c-4148-a208-2882fee74aab.
• Packer, L. Bees of Canada.
• Poelen, J.H., Simons, J.D. and Miller, C.J. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. in Ecological Informatics. Elsevier.
• Specimen records from arctos.database.museum. https://arctos.database.museum/.
• Specimen records from bins.boldsystems.org. https://bins.boldsystems.org/.
• Specimen records from ecdysis.org. https://ecdysis.org/.
• Specimen records from iNaturalist.org. https://iNaturalist.org/.
• Specimen records from mczbase.mcz.harvard.edu. https://mczbase.mcz.harvard.edu/.
• Specimen records from mycoportal.org. https://mycoportal.org/.
• Specimen records from scan-bugs.org. https://scan-bugs.org/.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1156633 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165301 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165564 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165565 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165587 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165700 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165701 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165757 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165762 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165816 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1165960 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1166137 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1166170 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1166253 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175572 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175738 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175805 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175842 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175939 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175949 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1175960 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176010 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176014 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176017 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176023 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176024 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176037 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176064 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176081 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176085 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176086 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176087 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176285 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176288 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176290 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176301 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176306 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176348 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176416 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176426 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176433 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176435 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176446 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176473 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176487 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176502 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176517 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176534 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176552 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176553 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176554 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176555 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176564 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176566 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176569 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176570 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176576 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176613 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176617 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176688 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176692 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176698 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176699 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176785 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1176844 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1177101 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1177160 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1180512 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1180513 collection.
• Specimen records from the USDA-ARS:BBSL1180514 collection.
• Specimen records from www.bumblebeewatch.org. https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/.

1 further entry in the dataset names no actual work and is omitted here rather than dressed up as a citation.

Corrections

Errors and photograph credit problems can be reported as issues on the project repository. If a photograph of yours is here and the credit is wrong, or you would rather it were not here at all, it will be fixed or removed.

Catalogue built 2026-08-18.