Data Collection
Justification
I am a trail runner. When I ran trails in the aftermath the Jesusita Fire (May 2009) I watched the burst of regrowth and the exuberance of the new blooms. That motivated me to really learn to identify the local wildflowers, and the best way to learn is to write down everything as I learned. This website is the result.
Methods
Data Collection
I run the trails, and I keep track of what plants I see, blooming, or just alive. I generally run at least 50 miles a week through the Los Padres National Forest around Santa Barbara.
As time progresses I have gotten better at noticing and identifying wildflowers, so earlier years are not comparable to recent years
I used to try to run all the major front country trails at least once a month, but with the Thomas Fire many of those trails became unusable. I try to run as many back country trails as I can, but with the Rey Fire some of these burnt too. The point being that this is not a very consistent sampling of the area around Santa Barbara, it is simply the best I can do.
When I first started I simply remembered what I saw on which trails and wrote that down when I got home.
Then, I would run with a camera and a GPS watch and from the time stamp on the camera I could figure out a location from the GPS track retained by the watch.
In March of 2015 I wrote an app for an android phone which would allow me to record sightings with time, date, location, and basic phenology as I ran along.
Building Calendars of Blooming Dates
Although I run a lot, I cannot visit every flower, every day. Instead I assume that if I saw a flower blooming one day and I return a month later and it (or a conspecific) is still blooming then it is likely that the flower has bloomed constantly since then. On the other hand if there is an interval of more than 2 months between bloom sightings then I assume the flower stopped and restarted. Between one month and two I make a judgement call based on past knowledge of the species.
Keys
Occasionally I provide simple keys to various taxa. These are not definitive. They are based on simple features which I can detect by running by. They will help distinguish between common flowers in the Santa Barbara area. Sometimes I get things wrong. If you want a professional key I try to provide links to the Jepson keys for those taxa.
Website
Development
George first handed me a database and set of php files back in 2018, and I promptly spent a week spinning up a version of his site using Drupal. This was a poor platform choice for this project, and after getting the site around 70% of the way there, I started butting up against the reasons why. Discouraged by getting to the top of the pass only to find another set of mountains ahead, I sat down and took a 2 year nap.
Fast-forward to 2020, possibly due to lack of distractions, I finally found myself with some excitement about starting up this project again. Part of the excitement was realizing that there was no real reason for the site to have an actual database at all, and that meant I would get to build a static site generator in Python, which was infinitely more interesting to me than doing another LAMP stack.
This also meant doing a lot more from "scratch". When I needed a lazy loader, I learned how to write my own instead of using a library. When I needed maps, I did not write my own. Who would have time for such a thing? I used OpenLayers.
Anyways, George has presumably forgiven me for knowing nothing about flowers, and occasionally passes me a new database. I can be reached through LinkedIn
