Name Changes Affecting El Dorado County Plants

Many familiar names have been changed, and a fair number of plant species have been reassigned to different families, and even some brand new family names have been added! If you know maples as members of Aceraceae, now you need to re-learn them as Sapindaceae.

Here are two lists for new Jepson treatments:

1. This list shows 215 plants with TJM1 (old names) and TJM2 (new names): 215 Name Changes.

2. There are plenty more to update, so here's another list: 1134 Plants in the Eldorado Forest.

The list is made up of 1134 plants that are located in the USFS Forest areas, plus plants from Pine Hill, Traverse Creek, and plants from Carson Pass. Want more? Calflora will conjur a list of 2636 plants for El Dorado County (http://tinyurl.com/7sajye5) and that link does a fine job of opening a list --with photos!-- on my iPad. If you have an iPad 2 with 3G, be very glad! Not only do you get to use GPS (real GPS, not the estimated location you get with WiFi triangulating from cell towers (close but no cigar!), but with a one-month data plan for $20 (the Verizon version), you get a full gigabyte of data download. I'll add info to this later, but imagine being out in the field and having access to Calflora to check your finds! It's a really neat option.

The list looks so simple, but it contains a lot of coded information. Here is how it works:

It groups plants by Life Form (Group 1 = ferns, Group 2 = trees, Group 3 = dicots, and Group 4 = monocots).Then you'll see Family and Species names, but again, coded. The problem is that there are many plants that have now been put into brand new Family associations, and some of these Family names are also brand new to most of us. Examples include Alliums which have long been simply a Genus within Liliaceae, have now earned their own Family name, Alliaceae; the Lewisias have been moved from Portulacaceae into their own Family Montiaceae. When there is a new Family name, the name appears in ALL CAPS.

Pay particular attention to the big changes in Scrophulariaceae, where all the Mims have no been grouped as Phrymaceae, and Castelleja ssp. and Penstemon ssp.are now included with Orobanchaceae.

Finally, a good many Species names have been modified, and this list shows the changed names along with a parenthetic mention of what the name was previously!

Just for fun, invasives are marked with a dagger (†) and plants of special status are marked with an asterisk (*). And the location names following the plant info are pointing out where the plant would be found. If no location is shown, maybe the plant is so common you will find it anywhere?

You might visit the pages for the Top Ten, and even Ten More Families, offering a head start about the important families you see practically everywhere you go.