Classification Guide

When you record a spot, you are noting how a place is doing. It helps to think of it the way you would check on a person: How is it? What is pressing on it?

Take an anchored photo

When you take a photograph, try to put a fixed thing in the frame – and also try to be close enough to see details.

Say what kind of place it is (function)

Pick the one that fits. This is what the place is for and how it stands in relation to people.

• Built. A human-made hard structure. A monument, memorial, plaza, or sidewalk.
• Cultivated. Ground that is planted and tended. Garden beds, planted trees or shrubs, a mowed lawn.
• Edge. The strip where two land uses meet. A median, a verge, a park border, the margin between a parking lot and a preserve, a fence line.
• Wild. Ground that grew in on its own, unplanted and untended. Woodland, meadow, thicket, marsh.

Say what you are keeping (focus)

Focus is what you are watching in this observation. It is the layer you can actually see and judge, not always the biggest thing present.

• Trees.
• Shrubs.
• Grasses.
• Flowering Herbaceous. Soft, non-woody plants: wildflowers, forbs, garden flowers.
• Ferns. Non-flowering, frond-bearing plants. The ferns of a woodland floor or a shaded wet edge.
• None. No living subject to watch. Bare ground, pavement, a hard structure.

If you are standing in a woodland but cannot judge the tall canopy from the ground, focus on the shrubs you can see. If trees stand over a strip you are keeping for its understory, focus on the understory.

Note the setting

Setting is the physical stage the spot stands on, the part you could not change by planting or mowing. Most places are upland. Change it only when the ground itself is different.

• Upland. Ordinary dry ground. The default, and most spots.
• Wetland. Ground that is wet at least part of the year: marsh, bog, pond edge, wet meadow.
• Coastal. Sandy shore ground: a dune, a beach strip.
• Alpine. Open ground above the tree line.
• Urban. The spot sits in the built matrix of pavement, buildings, and road. A street tree, a median, a planter in a plaza.

Note the blooming months

Record the months you see the spot in bloom.

Bloom is worth recording because it is directly observable and it matters. It marks when the spot offers something to pollinators, and the run of months across a year traces its real season. The picture fills in as you return. That is one more reason coming back matters.

Note how many kinds of plant are in bloom, not only that something is. A single early flower and a dozen at midsummer are both worth marking.

Rate the overgrowth: is something smothering the focus

Overgrowth is one organism taking over and choking out the others by blocking the light, surface, or oxygen they need. A vine pulling down a tree. A mat of growth sealing a pond. Rate how far the smothering has gone around your focus, not how much of the plant is present.

• None. No aggressive smotherer taking over. The plants present are coexisting.
• Present. A smotherer is here and established, but not yet blocking or overtaking your focus. Catching a fast-spreading invasive at this stage is the highest-value moment there is.
• Occluding. A smotherer is actively blocking light, surface, or oxygen right now. A vine dragging down a tree, a mat sealing water.
• Overwhelmed. The smotherer has taken over. Your focus is largely lost to it: a wall of one vine, a full mat, a monoculture.
• Unknown. You could not tell, or did not assess.

Two cautions. Overgrowth is not the same as messy. A healthy meadow looks shaggy and untidy, and that is fine. Overgrowth means one thing suppressing the others, never a place that simply needs a trim. And it does not matter whether the smothering plant is native or not. Duckweed is native and it still smothers.