Organization
USDA PLANTS Database
Also known as: USDA PLANTS, USDA PLANTS Database, PLANTS Database
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service PLANTS Database — the standard public-domain reference for vascular plants of the United States: names, symbols, and native/introduced distribution. The platform uses it, fully keyless, as the 'known to grow in' distribution layer on plant entries, complementing the evidence-based grows-in edges derived from cataloged farms.
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The USDA PLANTS Database (NRCS) is the standard public-domain reference for the plants of the United States. This page is regenerated by _private/scripts/ingest-usda-plants.py every run; it is the source hub every native-to / naturalized-in edge derived from USDA points to.
How the platform uses it
For each plant entry carrying a scientific_name, the ingest resolves it via the keyless PlantSearch endpoint to a USDA symbol, then reads PlantProfile.NativeStatuses. It writes native-to (USDA “Native”) or naturalized-in (USDA “Introduced”) edges to the matching place hub.
Honest granularity bound: USDA’s keyless NativeStatuses is region-level — L48 (continental US), AK, HI, PR, CAN, VI — with Native/Introduced, not 50-state. Per-state distribution exists in USDA’s data but only behind an undocumented single-page-app endpoint, which is deliberately not reverse-engineered. So this layer answers “native or introduced to the continental US / Alaska / Hawaii / Puerto Rico,” not “which of the 50 states.” The finer-grained, evidence-based answer (“a cataloged operation grows it here”) is the separate grows-in layer.
This run (2026-05-16)
Plants with a scientific name: 468 · matched + linked: 294 · no USDA native status: 69 · genus-level skipped: 105
| Region/Type | Plants |
|---|---|
| L48/Introduced | 173 |
| L48/Native | 110 |
| PR/Introduced | 93 |
| HI/Introduced | 64 |
| AK/Introduced | 27 |
| AK/Native | 19 |
| PR/Native | 8 |
| HI/Native | 1 |
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Enables: [[0mn1one]]
- Counterpart to: [[usda-organic]]
- Member of: [[organization]]
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