How these pages are made

What's behind the numbers and their reliability.

What counts as a record

Everything mapped here is a georeferenced occurrence (a herbarium sheet, a museum specimen, or a photo someone uploaded with a location attached). It all comes through GBIF, which pools iNaturalist, university herbaria and government collections into one search.

Reading the map

Each square is 0.25 degrees, about 28 km top to bottom. A shaded square holds at least one usable record, and darker squares hold more. Filled dots are herbarium specimens (ie. pressed sheets anyone can pull out of a drawer and re-examine.) Hollow rings are field observations, identified by community agreement. The buttons above the map show one or the other on its own.

Across the catalogue that's 169,113 marks: 24,189 specimens and 144,924 observations.

Two ways the map can be misread.

Dark squares are collecting effort, not abundance. The squares over Edmonton and Calgary come out dark for nearly every species on this site, because that's where the people making the observations live.

Empty is not absent. Unsurveyed and unoccupied look the same on the map while not meaning the same thing.

A record makes it onto the map if its coordinate is good to within 10 km, it falls inside Alberta or Saskatchewan, and its licence lets me redraw the coordinate.

I decided non-commercial licences are fine for coordinates but not for photographs as a photograph is someone's work while a coordinate is simply a fact about a place.

"Native to," and the blanks in it

Province-level native status comes from VASCAN, the Database of Vascular Plants of Canada. At the moment all 417 species carry an answer from it. So far I have included AB and SK and plan to continue this project across the rest of Canada's provinces and territories.

The ecoregions

Every species page lists the ecoregions its records fall in. That's how you get from one plant to the rest of the community it sits in, which is part of the reason this site exists.

A region needs 3 records before it shows up. Two records can be a misidentified sheet or garden escapes, and I'd rather not build a plant community out of that. The threshold costs me rare species which are the ones most worth finding but that is the trade off at the moment.

How current this is

The GBIF occurrence search + PRESERVED_SPECIMEN pass was retrieved 2026-08-24.

GBIF changes daily and this page does not. The GBIF and iNaturalist links on every species page are live; follow those for the current picture.

Known limits

Misidentifications are in here. I don't filter for identification-verified records. That flag is missing from most herbarium material, so requiring it would throw out the best-determined specimens in order to exclude very little.

Records near a border don't get counted. Each ecoregion outline is simplified to roughly 900 m on its own, so within about that distance of one I can't tell which side of it a record really sits. A record has to be more than 900 m inside a region before I count it for that region. That sets aside 3.6% of the records I hold, which then count for no region rather than a guess. It also stops a record being counted twice, which used to happen where two outlines overlap by a sliver: mostly around Calgary, where Aspen Parkland and Fescue Grassland run into each other.

Flower colour is imperfect. I have verified some of the flower colours but not all. This is a work in progress. If you notice gross errors please send me feedback.

Corrections

Not all the information has been checked by me by hand. If you come across something you know to be false I would appreciate any feedback. The catalogue and its underlying data are public and I'd like this public facing resource to be as accurate as possible.