My raised awareness of issues around native vs introduced plants resulting from my time on Twitter, as well as a decision to standardize my “group name” using the common name applied to the plant genus has led me to make a few recent minor changes to the USWildflowers website.  Hopefully these changes will be helpful to folks using the site.  Read on for details…

• The title section of the detail page has been enhanced. It previously only had the plant’s common name.  It has been enhanced to include the scientific name, both the scientific and common family names in which the plant is classified, the genus common name, and explicit listing as to whether the plant is a native to the United States or is introduced.  The genus common name currently uses the USDA Plants Databse listed name.  I may change to using a name listed in ITIS – thanks to @BotanyBuddy for the tip about that reference.  For native status, previously you needed to note the color of the states on the USDA distribution map included on the page.  That’s still there; I just wanted to make it more obvious.
• The HTML title of the detail page has had the scientific name added to the common name.  This may help locate the page on a busy desktop, and may also help improve web search results.  The detail page for Spotted Jewelweed provides a good example of the detail page changes. 
• The wildlfower search results page has had more information added for each wildflower in the results.  This is the page of thumbnails that you get when you search by name, or ask for a list of wildflowers from the state identification reference page.  Previously (N) and (I) were used to indicate Native or Introduced; I’m spelling that out now.  In addition, the genus common name has been added in from of the plant common name.   The genus name was used previously to sort and group the thumbnails, but without actually having the name there it was a puzzle as to what order the thumbnails were being presented.   The “All States List” is an example, and is a good shortcut to a thumbnail of each species represented on the site.  You might want to bookmark that page.
• Advertising has been added to many pages on the site. I apologize for this, but as I move toward retirement, I need to make my hobbies more financially self-sustaining. So far this advertising experiment hasn’t panned out in much revenue, but hopefully you won’t find the advertisements too distracting. In looking them over, many of the advertisements seem to be of real value, so you might want to check the advertisers’ sites out.
• I’ve been spending some time adding more photographs for the existing species on the site.  I have a target of having at least three photos for each species, and I’m planning on spending as much time this winter as possible working toward that goal.  So far 39 species have at least 2 photos – only 130 more species to go! 
• Finally, and most importantly, about a dozen species have been added to the site since the last post about the site’s functionality.  It’s up to 170 now. I’m trying to spend some time reviewing my catalog of nearly 5,000 wildflower photographs to work through some of the “unidentified” tags, getting proper identification and adding them to the database.  Sounds like I’ll have a busy winter.