Links to Relevant Websites

General Websites - All Regions

• PhytoImages. Maintained by Daniel Nickrent (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), photos and metadata are provided for over 120,000 images of plants worldwide.

• PlantSystematics.org. Maintained by Kevin Nixon (Cornell University), this DOL website is the software "mother ship" for PhytoImages and contains over 48,000 images of plants.

• USDA Plants. This is a comprehensive website (Plants Database) maintained by the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the USDA. It provides nomenclatural information, distribution maps, and photos of all plants known from North America.

• Wildflower Identification Website. This site by Steven Sullivan is really quite amazing! Lots of information is then available for each plant including distribution maps, phenology, habitat type, etc. A very useful site for wildflowers (no grasses and sedges!) for all regions of North America. One can select the "Parks and Trails" button on the left, and then navigate to Colorado and click on the link to Rocky Mt. National Park.

• Wildflowers of the United States. 2206 photographs of 616 wildflower species.

Colorado Plant Websites

• Colorado Rocky Mountain Wildflowers. This app is for your cell phone. It features many of the commonly seen wildflowers in this region. I have it and find it very useful!

• Plants, Rocky Mountain National Park. This series of pages, hosted by the National Park Service, provides photos and basic descriptions for algae, lichens, mosses & liverworts, trees & shrubs and wildflowers of the Park.

• Eastern Colorado Wildflowers. Includes 525 plant species growing east of the Continental divide.

• Colorado Wildflowers. For the nonspecialist, plants arranged by flower color.

• Plants of Magnolia. Although it is intended for non-botanists, the site contains photos of trees, shrubs and wildflowers present in the Magnolia district near Boulder Colorado. Site maintained by Jennifer Stewart.

• Writing a flora: the story of Jennifer Ackerfield by Mo Ewing. Published in 2015, "Flora of Colorado" (Brit Press) is 818 pages long and covers 3,322 taxa.  This flora is a remarkable accomplishment for many reasons, as described on this web page. Click HERE to read more about the book on Amazon.

Useful Websites from Other States

• Wildflowers, Ferns, & Trees of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, & Utah. A very useful website that allows one to identify a plant based on morphological features as well as flowering time, vegetation zone, habitat, etc.

• Vascular Plants of the Gilia Wilderness. By Russ Kleinman from the Dale Zimmerman Herbarium. Information on 1100 of the ca. 1500 plant species that grow in the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico.

• Montana Field Guides. Has lots of information (descriptions, photos, maps, etc.) on not just plants but fungi, lichens, and animals.

• Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses. This site contains information on nearly 900 species of forbs, grasses, sedges, rushes, trees, and other woody plants found growing in Kansas.   Most photos by Mike Haddock.

• Minnesota Wildflowers. A superb website with fantastic photography (many photos labeled). Some overlap with the flora of Colorado.

• Central Texas Plants. A compilation of photos taken as part of "Native Plants of Central Texas" course at University of Texas, the site is maintained by Katie Hansen.

• Flora of Eastern Washington and Adjacent Idaho. Beautiful plant photography presented by Robert L. Carr and Gerald D. Carr.

Grass and Sedge Identification

• Grasses of Iowa. Many of the grasses found in Iowa are the same as seen in Colorado, so this site is useful for identification.

• The Grass Manual. The treatment of grasses for Flora North America used to be up and running, but as this web page explains, it will be unavailable for several months while the site is improved and rebuilt. I can't wait until it is back in operation!

• The Sedge Family East of the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington. With sedges (particularly Carex), one needs all the help available to get an accurate identification. Although distant from Colorado, there is some overlap in these species from the Pacific northwest.

Herbarium Websites

• Rocky Mountain Herbarium. University of Wyoming, Laramie.

• SEINet: Arizona - New Mexico Chapter. This data portal covers plants in those two states, but many of these are also found in Colorado. Under "Flora Projects", there is one for the Colorado Plateau. Tina Ayers, Susan Holiday, and Glenn Rink have assembled a number of research checklists of plants that are quite useful. The plant names are hyperlinked to the relevant species pages. Those pages have photos (living plants and herbarium specimens), descriptions, and distribution maps.

• Colorado State University. Charles Maurer Herbarium Collection, College of Natural Sciences, Ft. Collins.

• Botany Section & University Herbarium (COLO), Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado Boulder. Includes database and research tools such as the Catalog of the Colorado Flora and Colorado Vascular Plants by County.

• Colorado College Herbarium. This page contains links to the pdf files of the work entitled "Peak to Prairie" by Tass Kelso. This describes the flora of El Paso, Pueblo, Teller, and Fremont counties including Pikes Peak. The specimens collected for the Pikes Peak flora can be accessed at SERNEC (Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections).