On Reddit, bobtheturd said, “Calscape doesn’t do a good job filtering for geophytes, so wondering which are your favorites. I’m in the Bay Area, so more specifically interested in those.” (The post got some interesting replies.)
Calscape describes itself like this: “Calscape is California’s hub for California native plants and native plant gardening, created for you by the California Native Plant Society.” Even today, I heard a couple people advertising it on the Growing Natives Garden Tour.
Geophytes are those vascular plants that survive unfavorable periods for growth by dying back to underground storage organs as rhizomes, tubers, corms, or bulbs.
Rundel, Philip W. “MONOCOTYLEDONOUS GEOPHYTES IN THE CALIFORNIA FLORA.” Madroño, vol. 43, no. 3, 1996, pp. 355–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41425147.
This got me wondering a little about how we might systematically identify all geophytes available in Calscape. Poking around online led me to Fremontia, Volume 44, Number 3, 2016 [PDF] (Archive), which is devoted to geophytes. In particular, Philip Rundel has an article “Making Sense of Geophyte Diversity”, which gives a breakdown of those found in California (along with other parts of the world).
Overall, petaloid monocot geophytes as defined here total nearly 240 species or about five percent of the total native species in our state. More than 80 percent of this diversity is contained in just two families that have their greatest importance in our woodlands and grasslands. The lily family includes 97 species, with almost half of these in Calochortus, or mariposa lily, a large genus with a distribution across the western United States and Mexico.
Visiting https://calscape.org/search gives you a listing of the full set of plants in Calscape, which you can then export as an .xlsx file.
iNaturalist provides taxonomy data: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip, as previously discussed here under Playing with iNaturalist taxonomy data in MariaDB; we can use this to map from genus to family, which is useful because Rundel speaks in terms of families as well as genera.
(Another intriguing source of taxonomy data, which I didn’t end up using this time, is the World Flora Online Taxonomic Backbone, https://www.worldfloraonline.org/downloadData. This includes both synonyms, alternative/outdated scientific names, and subfamilies.)
Putting these together, here’s a little Python trying to capture what Rundel says in code: https://github.com/fadend/calscape_geophytes/blob/main/calscape_geophytes/calscape_geophytes.py.
Here are the results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LlJWgk5vh1ecuCUstjKg8Riq7XEYGhvHXOWZ8VaZd2s/view?gid=1559003851#gid=1559003851.
Rundel mentioned there being “nearly 240 species” of geophytes in California. Not counting cultivars, trying to be faithful to his methods, we turn up 300. Perhaps we’re counting a few subspecies and varieties that he left out.
Interestingly, in a 1996 article, he says, “There are 262 species of such geophytes in California…” I wonder which ones were subtracted from the list in 2016.
Aside: We saw a few geophytes last Thursday at Byrne Preserve:
(I release theses photos into the public domain. These works are marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)
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