About the PLANTS Distribution Update Module

Please improve your database by sharing information about where plants grow in the U.S.!

The overall goal of the PLANTS Distribution Update module is to improve our plant species distribution information. A particular goal is to speed input and subsequent dissemination of distributional information about weeds, especially those that are either spreading rapidly and/or are poorly known. The USDA Animal Plant Heath and Inspection Service (APHIS) partnered with NRCS to fund the Distribution Update module primarily to advance this goal of improving current knowledge about exotic plant distribution.

The Distribution Update module encourages you, our users, to become direct participants in the PLANTS database. Each report submission will require certain documentation in order to maintain the high quality of distribution data now in PLANTS. Your information will be evaluated by NRCS floristic botanists to assure its reliability, and during this validation we may contact you for more information. The easiest submissions for us to validate are based on a voucher collection deposited at a recognized herbarium, or on the published literature. If we decide that a report is unverifiable it will not be included in PLANTS, though that can often be rectified if you resubmit with better documentation such as a deposited herbarium specimen or photographs. So please include as much information as possible to support validation and to streamline our validation process, and if you are unsure why your report was rejected please email PLANTS. Information about collecting voucher specimens can be found through the PLANTS Home Page by clicking on Links / Educational / Plant Collecting & Herbaria.

If you have suggestions about how to improve this process, or if you have large volumes of new distributional data that are more easily handled in bulk, please email PLANTS.