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Join Alan Weakley and Southeastern Flora team members Michael Lee and Scott Ward for an in-depth tour of FloraQuest: Carolinas & Georgia, a new mobile app designed for phone or tablet that helps users identify all wild-growing plants in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.Free; preregistration required. Register: https://reg.learningstream.com/reg/event_page.aspx?ek=0005-0014-3c323dc561204a0aa8f49156f4637c38
DETAILS
Since its inception more than 30 years ago, Alan Weakley's Flora of the Southeastern United States has expanded to cover more than 10,000 plant species across 25 states. From printed books to digital PDFs, to a modernized suite of web and mobile apps, the Flora is an ever-evolving suite of tools and products that continue to facilitate and enhance botany across the southeast.
In this program, the flora team will demonstrate how to identify plants in FloraQuest using dichotomous keys, graphic keys, diagnostic photographs, and a botanical glossary. After their presentation, the Flora team will then show how to use botanical characters such as flower color, growth form, geographic location, and flowering month to identify plants in the diverse wildflower beds of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Alan Weakley is a plant systematist, plant community ecologist, biogeographer, and conservation biologist focused on the species and systems of the Southeastern United States. Prior to coming to UNC in 2002, he had an extensive career in applied conservation biology, working with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, The Nature Conservancy, and NatureServe (the Association for Biodiversity Information). Alan is the author of Flora of the Southern & Mid-Atlantic States, a taxonomic manual covering about 7000 vascular plant taxa, now the standard in use across much of the Southeastern United States.
Michael Lee is currently a data scientist at NCBG and has spent the last 20 years at the intersection of botany, ecology, and information technology. He wrote the Flora of the Southeast web app (fsus.ncbg.unc.edu) and developed the FloraManager database that drives the Flora of the Southeastern United States, enabling us to publish customized floras for different areas with different formats and content. He’s an avid mapper and created customized range maps for several floras as well as tools to allow people to create their own maps at multiple scales. Michael previously worked in the UNC Plant Ecology Lab, where he developed the Carolina Vegetation Survey database and several other ecological databases for the National Park Service and has also previously worked for NatureServe.
Scott Ward is a research botanist at NCBG working for the Flora of the Southeastern United States team and its associated PDF publications, as well as web and phone applications. Scott is originally from western New York, has worked and collected plant specimens across much of Florida, and is now extensively exploring North Carolina and elsewhere across the southeastern US. His degree is in plant ecology from SUNY Brockport, where he also worked on a variety of community and wetland ecology projects. Scott also performs research at the NCU Herbarium, annotating specimens, utilizing specimens for dichotomous key writing, and accessioning many of his botanical collections into the herbarium.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
North Carolina Botanical Garden, 100 Old Mason Farm Rd, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, United States,Chapel Hill, North Carolina