A guide to P.E.I. plants in your pocket — so everyone can be a botanist

A new online guide is available to help budding scientists find and identify plants on P.E.I. 

The Illustrated Flora of Prince Edward Island includes information on more than 1,000 species of plants. 

The guide can be used on a mobile phone, and any new discoveries can be added to the database once they've been verified. 

The executive director and senior scientist at the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre hopes the new guide will get more people outdoors, just as the well-known iNaturalist initiative did on a global scale. 

"It's very exciting. Every day when you're out there is a potential treasure hunt," Sean Blaney said. 

The project was a long time in the making — decades, in fact. 

Dan McAskill said more than 20 scientists and researchers began collecting photographs and information back in 2002.

McAskill is chair of the Flora of P.E.I. team, a group of people who came together to make the guide a reality. 

He said the original hope was to publish a book, but in the end an online database people could take with them made more sense. 

"We wanted to make it possible for non-botanists to become more knowledgeable about plants and actually see the scope of the plants out there," McAskill said. 

"The more you know about animals and plants, the more you get engaged in making sure there's still animals and plants around, which is the first goal — but also to become potential stewards of those resources," he said. 

Blaney said the guide is meant to be user-friendly. Through the photographs, you can drill down to different characteristics of plants and then compare those to what you're looking at. 

"It allows users to go through and step-by-step identify each species with reference to those pictures ... Then for each individual species, it shows you a range map of where it's known on Prince Edward Island [and] a couple of words about its status and habitat on P.E.I.," Blaney said.

Blaney and McAskill think it's important to have as many eyes as possible out discovering new plants on the Island.