Page 16 - Black Range Naturalist Vol 3 No 3 July 2020

The Biota of North America Program (BONAP) - North American Vascular Flora and our “parent” website, The Black Range, have an arrangement in which the Biota program can utilize the images of Bob Barnes which are shown on the website; in exchange we are allowed to use the range maps of BONAP without copyright concern.
terms it “blows my mind” (or at least what is left of it). The map below shows the similarity of the flora of New Mexico to all counties in the United States. The lower percentage of similarity that is depicted as you move away from the state is anticipated, but the pattern of that variability is “way cool”, as cool as the Hillsboro Quadrangle Geologic Map which hangs on my wall. Want to see a set of flora as different from where we live as possible (in the US)? Go to Georgia. Maps showing these distributions are available for regions and states - see the link.
Perhaps the iconic source of information about the flora of the Black Range is found at the Vascular Plants of the Gila Wilderness. Its page on Gordon’s Bladderpod is linked to here.
SEINet’s site on the flora of Arizona and New Mexico is full of information from many sources and is definitive. Its page on the subject species is linked to here.
And, although there are many other sources of information, there is the Flora of North America. Among other things, it notes that the range of Physaria gordonii extends into Chihuahua and Sonora. Flora of North America is rich in resource, including a comparison of this and other Physaria species. A detail from a comparison graphic is shown at the top of the following page. Their page on the genus includes a key to species.
The range maps, like the one shown above for Physaria gordonii, come in many flavors and are extremely useful if you have an interest in botany. The map above shows the range of this species to the county level; in this case the green shading indicates that the species is native to the county indicated.
The Floristic Similarity Maps of Native Species is a new series of maps presented by BONAP. To say that it is informative is an incredible understatement. In technical
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