‘Go Botany’ Makes Plant Identification Easy for New Englanders

By Lydia Noyes
Published on November 27, 2017
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Photo by Adobe Stock/AGNES KANTARUK
Woman taking a picture of pink hortensias with her smartphone.

Are you seeking a better resource for identifying wild plants in New England? The Go Botany website may be what you need. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this project is an online resource that strives to make finding and appreciating wild plants accessible for anyone living in the northeastern United States.

Go Botany is an online interactive website based on the research of botanist Arthur Haines, the author of New England Wild Flower Society’s Flora Novae Angliae. The site’s ‘Simple Key’ contains 1,200 of the most common plant species in the region and the taxonomic steps that plant enthusiasts can take to identify each one. Users start by choosing one of six categories for the plant they wish to identify, and then work through a series of questions to track down its common name, learn about its habitat, and view its range maps. For those seeking more detail, the ‘Full Key’ and ‘Advanced ID Tools’ provide an online dichotomous key to determine a plant’s family, genus, and species out of a database of 3,500 potential plants in the New England area.

If you have specific questions about your plant search, you can join the Go Botany PlantShare community to befriend plant lovers throughout the region, collaborate on the search process, and get help with your trickiest identification questions. To learn more about this resource visit GoBotany.

Designed for plant enthusiasts and amateurs alike, Go Botany is an intuitive yet in-depth resource for all levels of plant lovers. Have you used a plant identification resource like Go Botany before? We’d love to hear about the best tools for each region at HeirloomGardener.com.

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