The Strength of Weakley

Years ago, I had the privilege of serving on the NC Rare Plant Scientific Committee for eight years with Dr. Alan Weakley, and I can truely say, each encounter was an incredible learning experience. It’s not often you get to work closely with a true genius in your field. For those who don’t know Alan, here’s some of what he’s been up to.

Alan is the Director of the Herbarium at UNC-Chapel Hill. While this may not sound glamourous to most folks, Alan has made it so. Several weeks ago, we (Logan, Doug, Zac, and I) attended a seminar at the UNC Chapel Hill Botanic Garden, where he talked about his new app, FloraQuest. Alan has long been recognized for his amazing taxonomic work in completely re-writing the Flora of the Southeast US, and this is the latest jewel is his amazing lifetime achievements. FloraQuest is a cell phone app, that enables you to identify virtually any plant you find growing in the wild, with incredible accuracy. This is light years ahead of most of the better known plant ID aps. The current version contains plants found in NC, SC, and Georgia.

The first section lists all plants in the region by name with an array of photos as well as herbarium images, and distribution maps. While this is useful if you have a keen knowledge of plants, it may not always be ideal for an amateur.

The cool thing for everyone else is the Graphic Key…as compared to the standard dichotomous key. The FloraQuest key starts by asking you which of seven plant groups (with example images) your plant belongs. The choices are: ferns, grass-like plants, monocots, dicots, palms/cycads, cacti and stem succulents, and woody plants. Clicking one of these takes you to a further decision, such as monocots takes you to another decision, orchids or other monocots. The next level of choices asks for your location (state and ecological region, followed by the soil moisture regimen where the plant is growing, the light regime, plant origin (if known), the flowering month, flower color, plant height, lower leaf length, whether it has chlorophyll, the number of leaves, leaf position, number of flowers, and growing surface. From here, it reduces your choices to one of just a few options, that you can further reduce with new questions and images.

Also available now is the Northern Tier region (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington DC, as well as southern portions of Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Ohio). Coming in the future are the Mid-South (Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi), the Western Tier (Louisiana, Arkansas, East Texas, Southern Oklahoma, and Southern Missouri), and a stand-alone, Florida.

You can download the FloraQuest app ($20) via the Google play store, or here. If you’d like to financially support this amazing project, which can certainly use your help, you can do so here. Like myself, Alan is at the typical retirement age, so please send both funds and congratulations, in the hopes we can keep him working on the project.