Hello everyone,
I've replied to a number of plant requests in /NativePlantGardening, but have yet to make a post announcing a project I have been working on called Easyscape. It is free tool started by the original creators of Calscape, before it was donated to CNPS.
Here's the link: https://easyscape.com
You can enter any address (or drop a pin) in the world, and it will generate a list of plants that are native to that exact square mile, or toggle to show non-native plants that should grow well there based on your exact climate. The site is intended to be a global resource to allow anyone to find their top native and climate suitable plants, personalized to microclimate scale.
The site is powered by 120 million plant observations (GBIF) and over 6 billion climate and elevation data points. We’ve spent years organizing and manually building detailed native range maps for nearly 14,000 garden-suitable species.
Using this data, the site provides local climate suitability recommendations for each plant on the species pages, including estimated irrigation needs, based on how your local conditions match up to those of the plant’s core native range. This can be particularly helpful for finding low-no water species for your area, or grouping similar irrigation need plants into the same zone to save water.
Here are some examples of interactive species lists.
1010 plants native to Greenwich, Connecticut:
https://easyscape.com/categories/all_plants?address=greenwich-connecticut&filter=native
440 plants native to Portland, Oregon:
https://easyscape.com/categories/all_plants?address=portland-oregon&filter=native
343 herbs native to London, UK:
https://easyscape.com/categories/herb?address=london-united-kingdom&filter=native
315 xeriscape plants native to Atlanta, Georgia:
https://easyscape.com/categories/no_water?address=atlanta-georgia&filter=native
The lists above can be filtered further in the search tab (/search) for dozens of plant attributes and categories. There are also a few other features, including local and online nursery inventories and an (also free) satellite-based garden planning tool with scaled icons for all the species.
The site is still a work in progress, so I’d really appreciate any feedback (UI, errors, etc.) that could be incorporated before a big update later this spring. I'd also love to know if we’re missing native species (non garden hybrids) that are available in local nurseries (or if you’d like a local nursery added).
The following will be included in the update:
- Generating invasive range maps, to automatically filter out and warn gardeners against planting the species locally
- Native pollinator update
- Improved plant recommendations and climate matching
- Toggle for metric values
- Ability to donate if you want to support the site
- A better and more obvious "next page" button at the bottom of the list pages
Our recommendations are dependent on native observations so the following types of plants can sometimes have less accurate recommendations: highly edible plants, artificial hybrids, and plants with few native observations. Feel free to check out our methodology here if you have any questions about how the site works including how we deal with riparian and semi riparian species:
https://easyscape.com/climate_suitability
by Easyscape_Plants
18 Comments
Holy shut
Wow. Is this open source / do you need any software assistance? This is the sort of project I’d love to contribute to.
edit: nvm, I saw the upgrade options, it’s commercial
This is super cool!
I’ve already used this like 7 times since you posted it yesterday, amazing resource, I hope you have some funds for server costs cause I feel like it’s gonna blow up haha
Kickass
This is huge. Thank you for this.
Feature suggestion: add additional sorting options. Different sorting options could be:
* Bloom start
* Bloom end
* Bloom length
* Height (both high to low and low to high)
* Pollinator species support (Perhaps this could use the same underlying data as the [National Wildlife Foundation’s Native Plant Finder](https://nativeplantfinder.nwf.org/Plants))
Love it.
Oh. My. Goodness. I’ve been scouring databases and wildlife action plans and you drop this beauty right into my lap
Incredible! Thank you!
This is awesome
This is incredible. Thank you for this, it’s exactly what I needed, it’s very hard to find info on native plants in my area (France) and this is truly a game changer.
I’m curious how you can claim it’s functional to a square mile level? That really just sounds like marketing speak to me since there is so much debate about whether many species are present even at a county level in the severely disturbed areas of the midwest. What are the actual sources of information being utilized to create these maps?
Can you expand more on how this is supposed to detect microclimates? Are you using some sort of hydrology and lidar modeling to know these things? Because again, it sounds like marketing speak and not a real function of this application.
Who is doing the writeups for all of these species? Is this being accumulated/scraped up by AI?
One error already spotted is that there’s a made up species listed as *Oenothera gaura* using photos of *Gaura biennis* and describing *Oenothera biennis*.
How do you aggregate nurseries? There are a couple critical local native plant nurseries missing from my area.
Thank you so much for this!
Absolutely brilliant! Thank you for sharing!
This is a godsend holy shit dude. You have created by far the most significant and useful new tool I’ve seen on this subreddit.
how accurate are the irrigation estimates?