What is in flower this month?

 At the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra a volunteer used to (and possibly still does) scour the gardens each month and compile a list of what was in flower.  This was provided to visitors to enable them to get more of a handle on what they were seeing.  We have thought that something similar would be a good idea for Mallacoota, basing it on what is held in the iNaturalist data base.

The way the project is set up means that all observations posted to iNaturalist in the area (see below) are automatically included.  So no need for special action (other than reporting sightings to iNaturalist) and I will add any new listings to my database each month.

Do other folk agree that this would be a Good Thing?

The project will be for an area I have defined as the scope of the U3 Mallacoota Plant Walks.  The area is shown as the pink polygon in this snip from Google Earth.  For context, I have also shown the boundaries of East Gippsland Shire and (approximately) Bega Valley Shire.

Note that I have ignored the State border as it is irrelevant to plants: they are more interested in soil, rainfall and sunshine!

My set of records from iNaturalist has (as at 6 June 2024) 839 elements.  They cover pretty much all types of life-form as shown in the page "Life Groups" in this Google Sheet.  I have focussed on the Plantae group for which we have 406 records and classified them to the month of observation.  The result is as shown in the page "# plant species x month".  Note that I have assumed that if a plant has been photographed it is flowering (or at least in bud): possibly some are only leaves and I have yet to work out how to resolve that for a sensible workload.

For the month of June there are 16 species in the set:

June species

Month	common_name	scientific_name	iconic_taxon_name	quality_grade
6		Styphelieae	Plantae	needs_id
6	apple-berries	Billardiera	Plantae	needs_id
6	black nightshade	Solanum nigrum	Plantae	research
6	Blue Dampiera	Dampiera stricta	Plantae	research
6	coast capeweed	Arctotheca populifolia	Plantae	research
6	Common Apple-berry	Billardiera mutabilis	Plantae	research
6	cudweeds, everlastings, and pussytoes	Gnaphaliinae	Plantae	needs_id
6	European Searocket	Cakile maritima	Plantae	research
6	fireweed groundsel	Senecio linearifolius	Plantae	research
6	flowering plants	Angiospermae	Plantae	needs_id
6	guinea-flowers	Hibbertia	Plantae	needs_id
6	juniper wattle	Acacia ulicifolia	Plantae	research
6	Mitre Weed	Mitrasacme polymorpha	Plantae	research
6	showy parrot-pea	Dillwynia sericea	Plantae	research
6	Sweet Wattle	Acacia suaveolens	Plantae	research
6	Woolly Pomaderris	Pomaderris lanigera	Plantae	research

The entry for Styphelieae is for a taxon where several identifiers have come up with possible identifications for a heath recently included.  There is not currently a consensus answer.  I think in the online observations this is currently labelled 'Genus Leucopogon': the confusion deepens as a 3rd observer seems to have withdrawn their suggestion!  There has been further discussion (see https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/219922166) which has resolved the identification to Leucopogon collinus at Research Grade but I have left the table as above to illustrate the topic. This exchange is an excellent example of how the iNaturalist system adds to knowledge about Life in the area.

The entry 'Angiospermae' - ie Flowering Plants - is particularly unhelpful but may get improved as experts look at the image (which is not of outstanding quality)!  It has indeed been improved to Lobelia purpurascens - largely based on the leaves - but I have left the more general term for narrative purposes.

For a few other taxa there is yet to be an opinion from any other observer so the record is not yet Research Grade: as I further develop the system it is a trivial matter to either restrict the reports to 'Research Grade' entries or to sort by quality assessment so that the Research Grade records are listed first.  Watch this space.