Using technology to engage our community of alpine plant enthusiasts

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens leads the implementation of the North American Botanic Garden Strategy for Alpine Plant Conservation, a blueprint for the protection of alpine plants in the US, Mexico, Canada, and Greenland. The Alpine Strategy has several conservation goals, both in-situ and ex-situ. It focuses on understanding and documenting alpine plants, as well as education and outreach. To this end, we developed the Colorado Alpine EcoFlora Project, which has the twin objectives of engaging our community of amateur botanists in alpine plant identification and conservation, and to document the biodiversity of alpine plants in Colorado. This is modeled on the EcoFlora Project that was started in 2019 by the New York Botanical Garden with funding from an IMLS grant, and has been implemented at four additional gardens with a focus on metropolitan vegetation. The Colorado Alpine EcoFlora Project is unique in that its focus is a habitat rather than a geographic area. This community-science botany project is fueled by iNaturalist, the free, easy-to-use nature observation app. Over the last year, we’ve partnered with other local non-profit organizations to teach the public about this technology, and to lead training in plant identification in the alpine. The Colorado Alpine EcoFlora Project is an opportunity to invite the public to actively participate in plant conservation while also gaining a deeper understanding of our natural world. The information collected by the project is already being used to find populations of alpine plants for ex-situ conservation, a huge help since locating big enough populations of alpine plants (which often occur in fairly low numbers at a site) to support a seed collection for seed banking has been one of the barriers to effective ex-situ conservation in this habitat. We look forward to harnessing the power of technology to better understand the distribution and phenology of alpine plants in Colorado, while empowering our community of plant enthusiasts.