Free resource to find native and cultivable cacti for your exact location

Hi all,

I wanted to share a free tool I’ve been working on that might be useful for choosing or caring for cacti species for your outdoor gardens. The site is called Easyscape: https://easyscape.com

You can enter any address or city (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. While not explicitly a site for cacti, it does contain around 150 cacti species to explore. The site is intended to be a global resource to allow anyone to find their top native and climate suitable plants.

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. I will say that in instances where a species has very few native observations, they tend to have poorer maps and less accurate climate and irrigation recommendations. The irrigation recommendations would obviously be best suited for in-ground plants as well.

Note: our main species form filter is currently limited to succulents. However, if you go to the search tab and search for "Cactus (All)" under Plant Name, it will return all your cactus species. Here are a few examples of interactive species lists generated for succulents as an example:

32 succulents native to Tucson, Arizona:
https://easyscape.com/categories/succulent?address=tucson-arizona&filter=native

406 succulents that are climate matches for San Diego, California:
https://easyscape.com/categories/succulent?address=san-diego-california&filter=cultivated

16 succulents native to Las Vegas, Nevada:
https://easyscape.com/categories/succulent?address=las-vegas-nevada&filter=native

The lists above can be filtered further in the search tab (/search) for dozens of plant attributes besides refining for only cacti. There are also a few other features, including local and online nursery availability and a satellite-based garden planning tool.

The site is still a work in progress, so I’d really appreciate any feedback before a big update later this spring. Any insights on how we could make the site better for everyone would be very helpful. I'd also love to know if we’re missing garden suitable native species (non artificial hybrids) that are available in local nurseries (or if you’d like a local nursery added). We’ve got an update coming soon with much improved recommendations and detailed native pollinator information that may interest some here. A toggle to metric values will also be added.