Missouri Botanists Big Year (MBBY) – 2023

Announcing Missouri Botanists Big Year 2023!

The Missouri Native Plant Society is extremely happy to host this third annual friendly competition on the online citizen science tool and website, iNaturalist. Our observations from this competition will help researchers track and better understand the flora of Missouri and how it changes over time, from native plants to exotic invasives. This data provided by our members will be publicly available, to help improve science communication.

Each year’s competition is a separate collection of data under the umbrella project “Missouri Botanists Big Year.” You must join each year’s project in order for your observations to be counted for that year’s event. You can sign up for the 2023 event by logging into your iNaturalist account (or creating an account at iNaturalist.org if you don’t yet have one), going to https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/missouri-botanists-big-year-2023, and tapping the JOIN button.

There are a few key rules:
• Observation must be a wild plant observed in Missouri in 2023.
• Observation must be research grade, so submit many descriptive photos.
• To be entered to win the grand prize, you must be a member of the Missouri Native Plant Society – join at the Membership link on the website.

For those of you new to iNaturalist or in need of a refresher, MBBY Project Leader James Faupel’s presentation to the St. Louis chapter (July 2021) , “Citizen Science with iNaturalist and the Missouri Botanists Big Year 2021 Project” was recorded and can be viewed on our website under the ‘MONPS Webinars’ link.

Additional Information

    If you are an expert in the field of botany in Missouri, please help us vet and identify the observations made. There are not nearly enough professionals helping identify the flora of Missouri on iNaturalist. Log onto iNaturalist and help here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?verifiable=true&page=1&spam=false&place_id=any&user_id=&project_id=missouri-botanists-big-year-2023

    Please mark the geoprivacy of any state-listed rare or endangered species as obscured.(If you do not, we will notify you.) Our partners at the Missouri Department of Conservation will greatly appreciate your assistance in helping protect our plants of conservation concern! See the list here – https://mdc.mo.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/Missouri%20SOCC%20Checklist_2022a.pdf

    This is a collection project for only the year 2023, within the umbrella project Missouri Botanists Big Year,that will collect the data of every year of the event going forward. You must join each years project to have your observations be included in each years event. Joining the umbrella project doesnt make your observations available to the 2023 project.

    To see all the vascular plants observed on iNaturalist within the state of Missouri, visit our project the Flora of Missouri – https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-of-missouri

    To see all the non-vascular plants (also known as bryophytes) observed within the state of Missouri on iNat, visit our project MOSSouri – https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mossouri

    Need help identifying a plant? Check out the Missouri Plants website for detailed information on our flora – https://www.missouriplants.com/

 

ADDITIONAL HELPFUL LINKS FOR MISSOURI PLANT IDENTIFICATION:

https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/search

https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/plantfinder/plantfindersearch.aspx

https://legacy.tropicos.org/Project/MO

https://bonap.net/tdc 

https://www.natureserve.org/biodiversity-science/species-ecosystems/plants

https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/home

https://grownative.org/native-plant-database/

https://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/

 

Thanks for joining the project and good luck!

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