The Sidewalk Botanist Scavenger Hunt 2020's Journal

I love seeing plants growing on the sides of walls, in very high-traffic areas, on top of piles of rubble, and the ones that seem to spring up overnight, flower, and set seed in just a day or two, highlighting the resilience of these little creatures.

For example I loved this photo of shepherd's purse, aka Hirtentäschel (Capsella bursa-pastoris) by @alexis_orion sprouting amongst the otherwise relatively desolate ecological landscape of sidewalk pavers in Berlin:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/44108152

➡️Join Project

Urban botanizing in the age of COVID-19

Since most of my botanizing these days is while walking the woofer in a heavily urbanized part of Chicago, I thought I would see how many of these common urban plants I could observe in 2020. Want to join along?

Many of the species on the project list can actually be commonly found in urban areas around the world (urban species homogenization is a whole academic subfield!), but the ones on this list are particularly common in the Chicago region.

Here's a guide that shows a photo, snippet from Wikipedia, and map of observations:
https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/11608?view=card

happy botanizing, fellow sidewalk naturalists!
—cassi