wadudu

Joined: Aug 3, 2020 Last Active: Mar 24, 2024 iNaturalist

I hope to use iNaturalist to better understand the local flora here where I live in Knik Valley, Alaska.

For this purpose, I have created an iNaturalist collection project, Plants of Knik Valley, to describe and map all of the wild plants observed in the Knik River drainage area.

With the help of my children, I have begun work on a Google-sites website, Kerith Creek Botany, dedicated to the plants of Knik River Valley, summarizing historical and modern practical uses (as well as some notes on personal experience) for each species of plant with references to printed books, arctos database, and of course, iNaturalist occurrence maps and taxonomy pages.

I am most interested in ethnobotany as well as modern practical uses of plants.

I am also a strong proponent of using all 5 senses when walking in the woods, which means chewing on samples of the plants I find along the way, deliberately including the sense of taste with all four other senses in my experience of the Alaska wilderness. This generally means enjoying the bitter bite of birch bark, the sweet coolness of watermelon berry stalk, the sharp sour of elderberry, or the pungence of green juniper berries, while I experience the sights and sounds, smell and feel of the world around me. It also means that whenever I make the acquaintance of an unfamiliar plant, my first question is whether it will be safe to take a taste.

Having grown up in Alaska, I have a familiarity with the plants around me, but thus far all of my plant identification has been via a small library of plant books purchased over the years (Hulten manual as well as others by Viereck, Pratt, Schofield, etc.; Arctos database has also been quite helpful). I have few friends or acquaintances with a knowledge of local plants so I have not had the opportunity to get outside suggestions or confirmation of species identification. I am hoping that I will find some of that here with iNaturalist.

View All