Leading up to Wildflower Weekend will be our week long Botany Blitz 2025, which will run from Saturday, April 5th, through Sunday, April 13th. This is the fifth 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.
To participate, log in to your iNaturalist account or sign up for an iNaturalist account if you’re not already a user, and join the Botany Blitz 2025 project (just click “Join” in the top right corner of the project page). Then download the mobile app for iPhone or Android. The app is very easy to use, however we recommend taking a few practice observations to get the hang of it before the Botany Blitz begins! You don’t need to know the identity of a plant to make an observation, since the app provides ID suggestions based on your photos and geographical location. Additionally, the iNaturalist community is comprised of many knowledgeable botanists and naturalists who can review your observations and suggest alternative identifications. At the end of the Botany Blitz, we’ll tally up our combined observations to see how many species we were able to find in 2025!
In 2024, the Botany Blitz was a great success. We had 61 observers who made over 3,000 observations of about 570 plant species. 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!