Biota of North America Program

The Biota of North America Program (BONAP) is a remarkable program which began in the early 1970s - and which is still decades from completion - to catalog every vascular plant found in North AmericaBONAP, Introducing the Biota of North America Program. It contains a massive collection of high-quality data. In general, BONAP contains much more accurate county-level data than the USDA PLANTS DatabaseBONAP, BONAP vs PLANTS, 2011.
The project has two major elements. First is the North American Plant Atlas (NAPA) which contains static maps of every species in the database showing exactly where they're found. For example, here is the page of maps for genus Acer (the maples). Note that there is one map for the genus overall and then individual maps for every species in that genus. Dark green means "this plant, native to North America, has been recorded in the wild in that state" and bright green means "this plant, native to North America, has been recorded in the wild in that county". Blue, similarly, means introduced species recorded in the wild in a given state (dark blue) or county (light blue). Bright magenta indicates a plant legally recognized as a noxious weed in a given state or county. (There are additional colors, but those are the most common.) Unlike the PLANTS database, NAPA contains county-level data for Maryland.
The other major element is the Taxonomic Data Center (TDC), which allows you to find a list of plants meeting certain parameters, including range, nativity, and a host of others. This data can be downloaded as a TSV (tab-separated values) text file. However, the only information provided in the TSV is a list of scientific names - no other options are available.
Despite the high quality of the data, BONAP has two key problems:
* All of the range map images in NAPA are copyrighted, meaning they cannot be included on our Wiki. We can link to NAPA pages but cannot use their images directly.
* The TDC obviously contains a fantastically large and useful data set... which cannot be accessed directly. You must download a separate TSV file for every parameter you wish to search on - there is no one single page where you can learn, for example, that Acer nigrum is a native tree reported in Harford, Montgomery, Frederick, Allegany, and Garrett counties, which has deciduous leaves arranged in an opposite pattern, spring flowers that may generate allergenic pollen, etc. To learn all of that, you would need to run individual queries on "native", "tree", each individual Maryland county, "deciduous leaves", "leaves in an opposite pattern", "spring flowers", and "allergenic pollen", and then write some kind of script to cross-reference all of that data.
These fundamental issues - and the general low quality of the website - mean that BONAP is substantially less useful as a resource than the less accurate but easier to query PLANTS database.
Category:Websites