Why natives
A native plant is one that evolved in this place — the same soils, rainfall, insects, and birds your block has known for centuries. Plant a California live oak in coastal California and roughly 5,000 species of insects, birds, and fungi can use it. Plant the same yard with imported ornamentals and that number falls toward zero. Native plantings are how a yard becomes a participant in the ecosystem instead of a hole in it.
How Native picks plants
When you tap Find native plants here, your browser measures latitude and longitude and sends them to a Cloudflare Worker. The Worker asks iNaturalist which plants people have actually photographed near you (filtered to research-grade, plants only), then cross-references California's iNaturalist place to mark each one as native, endemic, naturalized, or introduced. Results are ranked: California endemics first, then natives, weighted by how many local sightings the species has. Introduced species are pushed to the bottom.
Future versions will fold in Calflora, USDA PLANTS, GBIF, and POWO for care notes, water needs, and pollinator value. A Calscape partnership is on the roadmap for CNPS-curated planting guidance.
Privacy
Your precise coordinates never leave your device. Before any cache write or log, your location is snapped to a 3-mile grid square. The app does not collect your name, email, or device identifiers, and there are no third-party analytics, cookies, or ads.
Scope
Native ships California-first because two of the strongest curated data sources (Calflora, Calscape) are California-specific. The same approach works anywhere iNaturalist has a place_id with native/introduced annotations, so other states and regions are reachable as we go.