by Vanessa Voelker, Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves
The 2021 Wildflower Week BotanyBlitz was a huge success, and your enthusiasm for this event massively exceeded our expectations! In all, the community of 110 observers made 3,193 observations of 460 species of wildflowers, blooming woody plants, graminoids, and mosses. Of those observations, an impressive 2,680 (83.9%) reached Research Grade status.
It was a tight race in both winning categories, but our 1st place champions are @ktuttlewheeler for Most Observations (196 observations), and jabrams_foc for Most Species (108 species). In Most Observations, close behind in 2nd place was jabrams_foc with 193 observations, while sekistler and terrikoontz tied for 3rd place, both with 128 observations. For most species, sekistler was another close 2nd place with 104 species, and ktuttlewheeler in 3rd with 90 species. This was an awesome week of intensive botanizing, Kentucky!
Many thanks to the identifiers who helped elevate so many species to Research Grade: vvoelker, jabrams_foc, hbraunreiter, thomashulsey, jkoslow, rynxs, kentuckybotanist, mjpapay, williambee, laurabaird, trscavo, and ktuttlewheeler all helped to identify 50+ observations during the blitz.
The most observed species during Wildflower week was Dwarf Larkspur (Delphinium tricorne) with 68 observations, and filling out the rest of the top 5 were Blue Phlox (Phlox divaricata) with 66 observations, Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia) with 60, Virginia Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) with 54, and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) with 53 observations.
A final note: if this was your first iNat blitz and you enjoyed your experience, we’d like to invite you to join the Kentucky Botanists Big Year 2021 project as well! This is essentially a year-long botany blitz, where you can test your botanical mettle across the seasons. It’s a fun way to learn even more new species, and become more familiar with the ones you already know!