 So thanks for that intro, Tara. I was pleased a couple of years ago to have the honor to address this group before. Today I'm going to do more of an update on the floor project and a little bit less on sort of biodiversity of the southeast, and so forth. And I decided to start by kind of presenting what we aren't. What we don't want to do what we're trying not to do with the southeastern flora, and this is partly based on on my experience I was. I had the same job in North Carolina for 10 years that Tara has now the, the chief botanist for the natural heritage program, and went on to work for the nature conservancy and nature serve across the southeast before being in my current position. And I've always been focused really on, on making plan identification for conservation purposes with a real conservation goal, easier and more accessible to, to more people. So I'm going to start with this sort of partly joking but but also serious, the 21 anti theses of for writing. And I'm just going to read through them kind of quickly I think any of you all who have tried to identify plant to identify plants who have used for us are going to relate to a number of these. So, the first is the key is the maximum that keys are written by those who don't need them, the expert on a genus for those who won't be able to use them. Flores are bound books they should be as heavy as possible, and made with weak bindings, they belong on a table in an herbarium not in the field. Three, digital products are not real. For Flores should be written once and not revised knowledge is eternal. Did Moses need to go back to the mountain for a new set of stone tablets. Flores should be written as dryly as possible if any touch of humanity or humor appears, or love of plants, it degrades the science. Six, no pictures. There's nothing worth showing that can't be described in a minimum of 30 highly technical words. Seven, keep habitat descriptions as general and vague as possible, woods, road sides that way you won't ever be wrong. Eight, make sure to use Latin eight words that show you are a well trained botanist if a sepal is dark call it fuscus. If it's grooved call it molecular or can eliculate. Nine glossaries of technical terms should have no pictures make definitions technical and circular by reference. Molecular equals characterized by having a velecula. 10, if two general look superficially similar and are often mistaken for one another, make sure they are keyed far apart from one another. 11, start keys with the most technical characters possible then proceed to more obvious readily observable characters. In keys, never use vegetative characters that are apparent throughout the growing season. When you can and should rely on features of the ephemeral flowers or of the fruits that never set plants in sterile condition were never meant to be ID. 13, in keys use terms with general meanings, Brachs, like Brachs, without explaining their specialized meaning in that genus Brachs absent. How do I know that they're absent if I don't know what I'm looking for. 15, in keys use relative terms based on your own extensive experience plants large in course versus plants smaller and more grass. How much smaller and what does grass I'll mean, perhaps the user will eventually acquire that same experience. 15, in keys use characters that depend on the plant having been dried as an herbarium specimen. In keys never use characters that are most apparent when the plant is fresh plants should only be ID from specimens in an herbarium. 17, in keys use words ambiguously, sepals reddish brown versus sepals mostly greenish. What does that mostly mean. 18, write family keys using technical and obscure characters, placentation, exile versus placentation parietal and often intruded. So a strict procedure of key to family key to genus key to species key to infra species. If someone can't key a plant to the family, see number 18, they don't deserve to know. 20, early in a key use characters requiring mature fruits. Later in the key use characters requiring newly opened flowers. Ha, no pain, no gain. 21, keep the riffraff out of botany no PhD, then why do you think you can use a flora. So I hope some of those will be will fun be fun and and you'll be able to relate to. So our principle at the, at the four of the southeastern US project is wild plants to the people we want to provide tools that will enable citizen scientists interested amateurs, as well as professionals to identify plants. So we, I've been working on this project for about a third of a century, since about 1990. The project is collaborative hundreds of individuals have contributed treatments at its locations suggestions principle is that it's open access that it's scientifically rigorous, kept current based on the latest scientific literature, and supported diverse funding. We really want to reinvent the flora as a 21st century tool for biodiversity inventory management and interpretation. Another way to put that is we want to make it as easy as possible for a wide diversity of people to correctly identify and learn basic information about any of the 10,781 plant species. And there will be probably more tomorrow in the southeast current and constantly updated with the latest warranted taxonomy completely crosswalk to other flores and monographs conservation focused minimizing technical jargon, not dumbed down just easier to use visual visual with photos and maps, and using modern technology, we hope wisely and well. So, update ability is an important concept. And providing information useful to the biodiversity and the keys should be based as much as possible on vegetative features. When you're out there to survey for a rare plant. You can't always afford to be there in the second week of June when it's an optimal condition for identification using traditional keys. So we've, we're trying to develop a diversity of ways to identify plants. We're providing a traits database that will be useful in a variety of ways and also powers, the multiple access keys. We're presenting in our products, things like the G ranks and S ranks wetland status coefficients of conservatism invasiveness status. We're also providing a variety ratings. Those kinds of information that are useful for the land manager and by and conservationist. We're working on an ability to create species lists directly out of app versions of the floor, which I'll talk about. So dichotomous keys that this gets to the, the more positive side of what I presented at the beginning. We define against the idea that keys are written by experts and and in ways that don't make them easy to use by others. We try to design the keys to work as through the growing season, relying only as necessary and as late in the key as possible on transitory characters of flour and fruit. We are trying to minimize that unnecessary technical language. We are trying to juxtapose plants that are similar even if they're not closely related. In other words, we're trying to write a flora by field botanists for field botanists. We're also looking at including illustrations directly in the keys in the particularly in the app, the digital versions of the flora. So for instance in this key to two species of Jim no Carpium, the oak fern, Cecil basal basoscopic pineal of the proximal penny with basal basoscopic pinulate shorter than the adjacent pinulate versus more or less equal in link to the adjacent pinulate. Isn't it way easier just to know that they're talking about the relative size of six and seven. It takes what is almost impossible to understand but for anyone and makes it functional and and workable. How many times I used to want to have a key that separated Solomon seal and Solomon's plume and Bell works and mandarins and twisted stock. They're in different families so in traditional key writing they end up far apart from one another separated by technical characters requiring flowers or fruits. But usually when you see them they're not in flower or fruit and you still want to identify them. So we're trying to to create those kinds of keys that bring these things in juxtaposition. What have we been up to what are we up to. So a sort of update on the floor of the southeastern US. The many of you have your main way you have used it if you have is through the PDF versions the the 2022 edition was released back in April it had 2022 pages, simply by chance. The 2023 edition will will be releasing in April it will have more than 2023 pages. We've had over 11,000 downloads and it covers all are part of 25 states. We've been able to work on this through a variety of funders and collaborators. Our primary funding comes from an anonymous conservation philanthropist to whom we are deeply grateful. And he, he basically appreciated the idea of making biodiversity information more widely available across the region to provide a foundation for conservation action. So we have collaborations with nature serve and the natural heritage programs. We have quite a few funding relationships with various National Park Service offices. We have a significant project with the Mount Cuba Center, the southeastern grasslands initiative the floor of Virginia Foundation, a variety of state governments particularly through their natural heritage programs. We have three plants floor of North America and I naturalist. So, a lot of, we do this with a lot of help. We're able to develop a lot of collaborative projects, because of the way the, the, the project is structured, which I will now go into. We've been able to hire a team of people working on this project. And four of the key people I show here on the upper left Chris Ludwig, formerly botanist for the Virginia natural heritage program and, and my, my co author of the floor of Virginia. The upper right is Katie Gibson of high country apps and bozeman Montana probably the world's greatest developer of plant identification apps. We have a major contract with her working on these projects in the center, lower center is Michael Lee, a database scientist who helps us make all this work and understands botany, as well as databases and also people, a key person in the team. And on the lower right is Scott Ward, who we hired away from the Archbold biological station in Florida, who's developing a lot of the botanical information. And then of course, in the bottom left we can't ignore the plants. That's 12345678 species of ring cospora, all side by side. So, we're able to create the products that I'll be summarizing briefly through managing the flora as a database. And I expect you to to fully absorb that slide. So this enables us to create flex of flora's and flora let's and flora is for any area or any taxonomic group. We can do things like excluding waves or graying them out, because they're unlikely to be encountered. We can put maps in or out pictures or line drawings in or out custom information for a particular area like a park unit or a state, as well as some of pieces of information. So the current way the way we've mainly delivered the flora in the past is as PDFs. There are 27 different PDFs that are available for download by state by the full region by sub regions, etc. But PDFs are not an ideal way to deliver the flora. And so we're increasingly focusing on continuing to do the PDFs, but also focusing on producing apps and, and so forth. Which is sort of in beta development and currently rapidly changing is the floor of the Southeast Web app and anywhere you have internet connection, you can use this. There is the address. It essentially has all of the information in it that the PDF has, but it's easier to use on a mobile device than loading the PDF onto it and having long search times or scrolling or non adjustment to screen size. What I'm showing here is the information on a desktop, but you can use this on your phone or tablet as well anywhere where you have internet connection. There's various modes, color modes and data modes you can download all the info or you can. I mean you can use data light where you doesn't show the photos automatically if you have spotty cell connection, or it can show all photos by default. You can enter in the first the two four letter codes for species like C O V E and search, and it will give you the species that either have the two letter genus two letter species or, or those, or those letters in the in the scientific name. You can click on the species and see an account with the maps. And, oh my gosh, photos. So we're accumulating about, we have about 150,000 photos for the Southeast that we're curating, accumulating curating, tagging, etc. Everything is hyperlinked and so forth so I think this will be popular with a lot of folks who have been using the PDF, somewhat cumbersome on mobile devices. We are also though developing a the new floor request app, and this will replace the old floor request app. It'll be available on iOS and Android devices. It'll have multiple ID methods it'll have all the dichotomous keys that you, many of you have gotten used to but it'll also have a graphic or poly clave or flexible entry key. We're looking at interlinking this with iNaturalist so it'll also have AI as a means of IDing plants as well. One of the really cool things that I'll show you is that once you use the poly clave and get down to a set of species you can jump to a custom dichotomous key of the remaining species that is created on the fly by the by the app. And there will be photos and so forth. So the graphic key. The basic idea here is that you can enter easily observable information about a plant and let the computer do the sorting you're not directed through a dichotomous key where you may hit a block where you don't have the information needed. So if you enter from a menu that you're in an unglaciated montane Pennsylvania you're growing the plant is growing in a wet place. It's a broadly woody plant and a shrub rather than a tree the leaves are opposite and compound. You've gone from over 10,000 possibilities to just two, then you can look at at images of those two. We have to develop a gigantic traits database in order to power this. Which we're doing so I'm going to show you a few screenshots of what this. What this looks like. So, here's some of the opening screen with general information and and help information and so forth, like the diagram of flower basics. And then we're going to look at the grant gram of leaf shapes and definitions on a map of the region. The first of the apps that we're going to release will cover this region, including Kentucky, the sort of what we call the northeast of the southeast. The area from from Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky northwards. When you have the app installed you can select the area that the keys will be generated for. So that could be Kentucky or if you always botanized in Kentucky and Tennessee, you could set it to both of those two states. You also have a choice as to whether to download additional images if you have space on your device. Or you can set it more finely over here on the right, just to the interior low plateau of Kentucky or the coastal plain of Illinois. The graphic key works this way you begin your, you're directed to a menu which which allows you to choose what general group of plants that you're in. You can choose selected ferns, and then true ferns not fern allies. And that leads you to a screen where you can choose additional information you can use choose to use your location. There's habitat information, you can enter a family or genius if you know what family or genius you have in front of you. There are characteristics of the plant that are relatively simple to observe so what I've done here is gone from 60 ferns and entered that the fertile front is very different from the sterile front and the dissection of the blade is very different. And that takes us to two species if I click the show button. I get this page which shows Lauren Syria area later, or would worry area later, and on a clear sensibilist, both are common. And it sorts the species by their commonness in the area and gives you the more common species to the top. And then I can, I can either look at the thumbnails of these and go to the pages and compare them, or I can click this identify further with our instant key button. And what that does is is jumps me to a key which juxtaposes on a clear sensibilist and Lauren Syria area later, and gives you the features that will enable you to distinguish between those. There's a ruler on the app which is adjusted to whatever your devices will click up a centimeter ruler if you need to measure something. And then you can go to the species account and see photographs and all the information in the flora, as well as breadcrumb trail showing you how you got there what you, what you clicked to get there. And then you can change map for the species. So, that's the, the app will be released. The floor quest app will be released covering Kentucky in May. And then we will proceed through four more apps covering the rest of the southeast region. So that's, I am out of time. I put up some addresses and so forth for you email me if you have thoughts or ideas. The web app is at that web address floor PDF downloads are at that web address. And I'd also encourage the Facebook page, which I post fun pictures of about plants and it also updates on the progress on the floor. So if there's time for any questions I'll be glad to take them but thank you for your, for your interest and attention.