rock daisies
Mapping where rock daisies grow across North America for a CAS botany research project
Rock daisies are a group of small flowering plants (the tribe Perityleae) that often grow on cliffs and rocky outcrops. This project supports Isaac Lichter-Marck’s research on them at the California Academy of Sciences by showing where each species has been found.
Two things make that harder than it sounds. Plant names change over time, so the same species can show up in records under several different names. And the records themselves are scattered across a huge public database of species sightings called GBIF. The toolkit I built sorts out the naming, pulls the matching records, and turns them into maps: flat maps, density heatmaps, and interactive 3D views that show the plants against the terrain they live on.