Leading up to Wildflower Weekend will be our week long Botany Blitz 2024, which will run from Saturday, April 6th, through Sunday, April 14th. This is the fourth year for our Botany Blitz, which is an effort to document as many plant species as possible within Kentucky during the week preceding Wildflower Weekend. The Botany Blitz will be again hosted on the community science website iNaturalist, and participants will be using the iNaturalist mobile app (or website, if your preferred camera is not a smartphone!) to upload photos of budding and blooming plants they observe in local parks, state parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and nature preserves.
We encourage anyone interested to sign up for an iNaturalist account if you’re not already a user, and join the Botany Blitz 2024 project (just click “Join” in the top right corner of the project page), and download the mobile app for iPhone or Android.
At the end of the week, we will have a map and totals by numbers, species, and by each person of all the great collections we found! Additionally, expert botanists and people with a keen identifying eye will be able to add comments to your specimens on why they agree or disagree with a certain identification, so we can learn better ways to ID plants in the future.
In 2023, Botany Blitz was a great success. We almost 70 observers who made over 3,763 observations of 653 species of plants. We can do even better this year! Help us make this Botany Blitz the biggest ever!
Of course, you don’t need to wait till the Botany Blitz to start making observations on iNaturalist, and wildflowers across Kentucky are already starting to show their stuff!