More Calflora Observations

I am up to almost 700 observations submitted to Calflora.  It really does give a sense of the scale of California. For example, a bulk of my observations were made in the hills on the north end of Orange County. After quite a few hours, I have only searched a small percentage of the hills. 

To get a really good idea of what is there, I would need to search the mountains a few times. Some plants are dormant, dead, or otherwise really hard to identify at certain times of the year. So I would need to walk the trails in a couple different seasons until I actually had a decent map of what is there.

Just found a Monarch

I planted a narrowleaf milkweed plant last December. Amazingly a monarch seems to have managed to find the small plant hidden in my yard because I just found a monarch caterpillar.

Traffic Calming

My quest to be that annoying neighbor who always harasses local government continues. La Habra is looking for comment on some traffic calming projects, so I sent them the following letter:

In general I support the idea of traffic calming projects. High speed traffic in La Habra should be restricted to Beach, Whittier, Lambert, Harbor, and Imperial. I therefore have nothing negative to say about the changes in the proposed neighborhoods.

The choice of places to use traffic calming strike me as a little odd though. Traffic calming should be done to make roads safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. Therefore the greatest impact will be had where there are the most pedestrians or bicyclists. The proposed areas don't seem like where the bulk of pedestrians are. Traffic calming should primarily be based around slowing traffic in two areas: around schools and on and near La Habra boulevard.

For example, it seems strange to me that area O extends from Lambert to Imperial. There isn't much there in the way of pedestrian traffic that far south on Walnut. A much better choice would be to extend it from La Habra to Whittier. There is a school there and businesses on La Habra boulevard and Walnut are within walking distance of homes so lots of pedestrians are on this part of Walnut compared to the Lambert to Imperial stretch. I have personally been involved in an accident there, so I can vouch for too high of car speeds for the neighborhood.

There is also no mention of the place in La Habra with by far the most pedestrians. La Habra Boulevard. This is the only place in La Habra where large numbers of businesses are an easy walk from large numbers of homes. There is also a school and a library so there are large numbers of children walking along the road. Because of the high speed of cars, and the large number of pedestrians this is the road which would most benefit from traffic calming projects. At the very least they should alter the timing of the lights to give pedestrians crossing the street more time to cross and widen sidewalks. I would even support more drastic proposals such as protected bike lanes or eliminating a lane of traffic and installing angled parking. Some of these proposals will undoubtedly be fought by those who want faster traffic at all costs, but Whittier, Imperial and Lambert all parallel La Habra Boulevard and could easily take all the longer distance commuting. 

As far as proposals for what type of traffic calming should be used in the neighborhoods described in this proposal. I am a strong advocate for items which make the road feel less safe to drivers, causing them to slow down. Many of these are described in the 2006 NTMP document such as making the lanes less straight, more narrow, or installing roundabouts. In general I don't much like speed bumps, but the elevated crosswalks seem like a good idea.

55 plants in 4 days

I may have got a little carried away this weekend. I managed to identify 55 plant species in 4 days and post them to Calflora. Actually, a lot were duplicates, just posting that the same plant was in multiple locations. So it was probably only 40 plant species.

What was impressive is how often I was wrong. Luckily I used the what grows here application from Calflora to check the most likely ID on a bunch of plants. That application lets you see a list of every reported plant within any map you choose. Often I found that what I thought was one plant, was actually some very slightly different plant.

I have had worse hobbies, at least this one involves exploring the area and getting a moderate amount of exercise. 

Calflora

I am a bit of a sucker for citizen science projects. The latest one I have jumped on to is Cal Flora. They have been compiling information about California native plants for some time now. I just discovered that they have an iphone app. While in some ways the app is very crude, it only lets you submit data not search through data others have submitted, it is also very easy to use for submissions.

In the last two days, I submitted 9 plants to the site. Once you have submitted a particular plant one time, a second plant of the same species can be submitted in seconds so it is quite efficient. This might even be more of a time waster than the time I signed up for Snapshot Serengeti. At least it is more exercise.

Little details may drive me crazy though. For example I just learned there are many very similar mustard plants growing in this area, Sinapis arvensis, Brassica rapa, Brassica nigra and Hirschfeldia incana. I can identify mustard, but telling those apart is rough. The same for wild oats, telling Avena barbata from Avena fatua is not trivial.

Apple is slipping

After getting lost one too many times from relying on Apple maps I switched back to Google maps a few months ago. It has some flaws, for example it is not as easy to bookmark common destinations and if it does not know a location it will sometimes send me to the center of the city, or even the state, where I said to go without telling me it did this. However, it does not give absolutely ridiculous directions nearly as often as Apple does.

Now I just switched to Chrome as my browser on the iphone. Apple has refused to implement the most basic and necessary feature I need in a browser. The ability to turn off mobile sites. In Chrome I just select one option, and magically all mobile sites disappear. After years of pressing "desktop site" buttons which don't work, and trying to find covert ways to avoid the mobile version of sites I feel stupid for not making the switch years ago.

What's this plant?

In some ways, the What's This Plant subreddit is the most remarkable crowd sourcing I have seen. On a couple occasions I submitted pictures of plants to the site. So far the subreddit has never been wrong. Now, it doesn't actually have a perfect record. I am sure a good botanist could stump it. It still manages to come up with identifications for most plants which is no small feat given how many millions of plants there are.

Matching its ability with a computer would be a neat trick. The pattern recognition of humans still seems like it is ahead of computers but I imagine we are getting close to the point a computer would do this. Would make for a neat iphone app, take a picture of a field and get all of the plants tagged.