USDA PLANTS Database

The USDA PLANTS Database is a program run by the United States Department of Agriculture, and is intended to provide a comprehensive database of all native and naturalized vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens found within the U.S. and its territories. It is a collaborative effort of the USDA NRCS National Plant Data Team, the USDA NRCS Information Technology Center, the USDA National Information Technology Center, and many other partnersUSDA, About PLANTS.
The PLANTS database was used extensively to build out a skeleton for this wiki, because it is the largest and most comprehensive data source of its kind. However, there are several substantial problems with the PLANTS database which must be considered:
*Although it does differentiate native and exotic plants, it does not have a record of what plants are considered native to Maryland in particular (or to any other state, for that matter). It offers no precision beyond "native to the lower 48 US states".
*The "national common name" provided by PLANTS is not necessarily the one most familiar to gardeners.
*The range maps provided by PLANTS are from data provided by the Biota of North America Program (BONAP) in the 80s and 90s, and have not been substantially updated sinceBONAP, BONAP vs PLANTS, 2011. At that time, BONAP reported no county-level data for Maryland whatsoever, and as a result the PLANTS database has only state-level data for Maryland - and not particularly fresh state-level data at that.
*PLANTS is only intended to include native and naturalized plants and may not include plants which are commonly cultivated by gardeners if they haven't been recorded escaping cultivationUSDA, PLANTS FAQ. As such, the most harmless exotic plants are potentially completely unrepresented here. For example, the typical garden tulip, Tulipa gesneriana, is not recorded as having naturalized in Maryland and so will not appear in a data set of exotic plants found in Maryland, even though there are millions of tulips in Maryland gardens. (Tulips have apparently escaped cultivation in tiny pockets of Massachussetts and Ohio - otherwise, they wouldn't have a PLANTS page at all.)
*Though some images are public domain (as all works created by the federal government are) many of the images on PLANTS are actually copyrighted. There is no way to search for public domain images only.
Despite its faults, PLANTS is far and away the easiest to access data source. Its Advanced Search engine is - if not perfect - at the very least quite excellent compared to other data sources, and can provide CSV files which we were able to further process programmatically to quickly generate thousands of article stubs.
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