Wisconsin’s native plants now just a mouse click away

Need help naming a wildflower? Identifying a weed invading your garden, or the plant your toddler just rolled in?

In Wisconsin, solving these and other botanical mysteries has been a problem because there is no handy, authoritative catalog that people can use to quickly find out about wild plants.

Photo by Mark Larocque Goodyera pubescens, one of over 2,300 native and naturalized Wisconsin plant species on record at the Wisconsin State Herbarium’s web database.

But now, just a mouse click away at http://www.wisc.edu/herbarium, the Wisconsin State Herbarium at UW–Madison maintains its exhaustive, online database of native and naturalized plants of the Badger State.

The site, according to Herbarium Director Paul Berry, is precisely the resource — complete with more than 2,300 images — for people trying to find information on an invasive weed, a rare wildflower, or make the distinction between poison ivy and something more benign.

“We’re the ultimate resource in the state for identifying plants and this is a way to put that information out there so it’s easier to get at,” Berry says of the user-friendly, searchable on-line database that catalogs all of Wisconsin’s 2,563 native and naturalized vascular plant species.

For each plant, there is a page that includes scientific and common names, a description of habitat, links to other sources, and the plant’s status if considered rare or potentially invasive. For many plants, the pages also include photographs and distribution maps that detail the history and extent of the plant’s range in Wisconsin.

The site, says Berry, will be of special interest to such people as elementary and high school teachers, naturalists, prairie and wildflower enthusiasts, amateur and professional botanists, scientists and government agencies.

Easily searchable by using common or scientific names, the site’s search options also lets users home in on a plant by using broad family names that will scour the database for all species in a particular botanical grouping.

Berry, a professor of botany, says some features of the site may be especially helpful to teachers and students. For example, students can search for plants by habitat — prairie, bog, woodland — to get an idea of the species that make up different plant communities and how those plants might be used in a restoration project, an activity popular in many Wisconsin schools.

Berry emphasizes that the Herbarium’s online database includes only native and naturalized plants and not the cultivated plants found in gardens and farm fields. It also does not include mosses, lichens or algae.

The site was developed with support from the Aquatic and Terrestrial Resource Inventory of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Biological Resource Division of the U.S. Geological and Natural History Survey.