How to Start a Nonprofit in Virginia

Review of Virginia Wildflowers

I tried a couple other apps to see what the experience would be before downloading Virginia Wildflowers. It was recommended to me by a coworker who is a wildlife biologist for the US Forest Service. The other apps I used were picture based apps. That is, the user takes a picture of the plant being identified and the app attempts to match it. Virginia Wildflowers doesn't work like that. Also a side note, it isn't just for wildflowers. The app will help you identify everything from conifers to seaweed. VA Wildflowers works off the user inputs. The data you will need to put in is plant type, color, petal arrangement, leaf arrangement, location, elevation, month, and habitat. The database of plants in the app is 3,071. According to landscope.com there are about 2,500 vascular plants in Virginia so the database should have the plant being identified available. I tried it out with several plants during a work project involving invasive species reduction along a prescribed burn unit edge. It worked for me pretty well, with only a few lapses that I believe are due to the roadside nature of some of plants being identified. Queen Anne's lace being one of them, since it is more of a meadow plant but was occurring along the roadside in this instance. In general, if the plant is in its common habitat the app will properly identify it. Apps that identify based on a picture eliminate the need for user input and therefore mitigate a common cause of misidentification, user error. However, if the user can get all of the inputs right, it works. One component that I really like about the app is that the user ends up expanding their knowledge about plants in general if they pay attention to what the app is spitting out. For instance, i didn't know that there are so many more trees with an alternate leaf patter than an opposite leaf pattern - common trees with an opposite leaf pattern are almost all Ash or Maple. The user can learn to make some of their own guesses about identification based on trends from using the app over time. This is not possible with apps that are based on picture ID only. Overall, if the plant is occurring in its normal habitat, especially during its mature, reproductive phase when flowers or berries are on the plant, and in its primary state, this app will catch it.

Virginia Conservation Network Spotlight

Virginia Dendrology

Invasive Species in Virginia

Using Web Soil Survey tools

This morning I sat down to see if I could learn to use the USDA's Web Soil Survey. The amount of data that is accessible is so large and site specific that using a whole state as an Area of Interest wasn't logical, so when defining my AOI I chose an area that I've been working in lately. The area I chose is along the James River in the Jefferson National Forest.

You can see that there are several units within this AOI that I've defined by a rectangle, and that there is a lot of data available on the kind of soil and slope that is within each unit area.

I wanted to try a  little bit of a bigger area so I defined my AOI by county, and I chose the county just based on where my original AOI was, which was Rockbridge County.

I split it up into two pictures here so you can see the entire option bar and data output that was generated. 

For Rockingham County I picked an option to look into from the option bar. I picked seedling mortality, and it assigned a rating for seedling mortality rate to each map unit. You can see that there are a lot of different suitability and limitation options that you can look into based on the soil data. 

Under the Properties and Qualities tab you can also look into factors like susceptibility to erosion 

For a beginner like me, a handy feature is the View Description button, which will open a box that tells you what the rating means. In this case, to put it very simply, the higher the rating for each unit the more that unit is susceptible to erosion

Whole overwhelming at first, the Web Soil Survey is an amazing tool that you can use for all types of applications, from planning your garden to planning large scale developed recreation projects and their impacts on the soil in your planning area. I used this tutorial to walk me through the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vszIhcghykk&feature=youtu.be&t=1m49s

Climate and Weather Resources

For the State of Virginia there are tons of helpful climate and weather resources.

The National Centers for Environmental Information, a subset of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a wide variety of historical and present climate data. You can get data by the month, historical data for normals, wind data, and data at a glance here

If you find that there is an overwhelming amount of data there and would like to start smaller, you can find a really cool tool for looking at different parameters (average temp, precipitation, drought index, and more) by state here .



Here is what that graph looks like for average temps in Virginia during the month of May from 1970 to present.

You can also down load your data in spreadsheet form. 

Another resource for drought information by state is drought.gov. This website is very intuitive and it's easy to find drought information by state or for a more specific location, as well as drought response plans and associated organizations like the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. To see the drought conditions for Virginia go here. Drought.gov also allows you to download more specific data in spreadsheet form. 

Of interest to Virginians is storm event data, as hurricane seasons can be severe. You can search the NOAA database of storm events by state or area here.  

It can also be fun to poke around the US Global Change Research Program's website. Virginia falls into the Southeast region, and if you go to this page there will be tons of helpful charts and studies on climate change factors and data, and graphics like the one below. 

For current and predicated data for more specific locations, there are Remote Automatic Weather Stations that report data from various locations.  RAWS data includes precipitation, RH, temperatire, solar radiation, wind, and more. You can find the data for the Virginia RAWS stations here. 

Other websites that I find useful for tracking local weather are wunderground.com and intellicast.com. Both of these websites provide real time, past and future satellite and radar with live action. This is useful if you are out doing field work and don't want to be caught in a storm.