Howdy all,

The organization I work for has a unique opportunity to help the owner of two large West Texas ranches to become better acquainted with his land (totaling nearly 4,000 acres) in Pecos and Crockett Counties, and to start the process of wide-ranging land restoration processes to reverse decades of cattle operations and erosion. Our first step was to do a plant survey with the intent of noting as many unique observations as possible.

Unfortunately, the person taking the photos had geolocation turned off, so the location information is generalized to each of the ranch locations.

Also, we're not West Texas plant specialists, but more focussed on Central Texas plants.

So if you have some expertise with the Trans Pecos region, can you help us out? The observations in question are under my account, https://www.inaturalist.org/people/11160 and center around September 3 and 4, 2023.

Thank you!

I turned on the automatic aggregator to automatically add plant observations in Texas to this project. If you want to share the precise coordinates of your obscured observations, go to "Your Membership" . If you want to share your obscured locations with the project curators, click "Project Curators". You can also choose to share your locations on a case by case, or never.

Recent icy weather notwithstanding, the days are starting to warm up, and plants are starting to sprout in the natural world we call Texas. All kinds of green things are starting to poke up out of last year's leaf litter... a lot of promise of good things to come.

As it is in the great outdoors, so too is it here in The Plants of Texas: good things are germinating and sprouting. While I'll have to be a little mysterious about what might be coming to this project (as the details are nowhere near final), many of the changes will help promote the conservation-awareness value of the data that is collected here. (As of this writing we have 994 taxa observed, and 2,137 unique observations.)

Also, I'm happy to welcome Cullen Hanks, of Texas Parks and Wildlife in the Wildlife Diversity Program, as a data manager for the project. He has created and curates a number of other conservation-related projects on iNat. Among them, it's his Herps of Texas project that initially served as the inspiration for me to start Plants.

So, stay tuned, and please keep adding your observations. Great work!

-Marc

I made an icon... that's Lindheimera texana – Texas yellow star - at the center of the flag.

Let me know if you think the new required Invasive field is okay or needs modification. The idea is that it could be used for various invasive monitoring efforts, like http://austintexas.gov/invasive or others. Any thoughts welcome.