The post USDA’s “PLANTS” database is amazing! appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Did you know the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) maintains the world’s most widely used online plant educational system in the world? The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) hosts a massive online plant database, called “PLANTS” that provides anything you would ever want to know about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. According to the website, the database includes names, plant symbols, checklists, distributional data, species abstracts, characteristics, images, crop information, automated tools, onward Web links, and references. Plus, there are 40,000+ gorgeous high resolution plant images available for personal or educational use.
PLANTS is a collaborative effort of the USDA NRCS National Plant Data Center (NPDC), the USDA NRCS Information Technology Center (ITC), the USDA National Information Technology Center (NITC) and many other partners. The information exists primarily to promote land conservation in the United States, but academics and the public are welcome.
Just how popular is the USDA-NRCS PLANTS database? Try 70,000,000 hits and 1.8 million users per month! Are you a gardener? Did you see a weird plant you want to identify? Want to check out the plant of the week? Here are some things you can do at PLANTS:
There are a lot of fantastic online government resources available to the public free of charge. I’m hoping to dig up more in the coming months.
The post USDA’s “PLANTS” database is amazing! appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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