Planting Life Data organizes information about native plants to be accessible to gardeners. This is used by Planting Life, but may be useful for other projects focused on native plants.

The collected data will make it easy to answer questions such as:

• What plants are native near me?
• Will it grow in the shade?
• How tall is it?
• Will it get eaten by deer?
• Will it take over my garden?

Contributing

If you're considering helping out with this project, thank you! You're awesome!

Two big ways you can help out are:

1. Plant enthusiasts: Suggesting new or better places to find information on plants
2. Programmers: Implementing the fetching/parsing of data for fields or sources which aren't yet supported

To make a suggestion, please create an issue.

Design

Data is collected using an ETL process driven by Luigi. Fetched data is cached to limit how often external services need to be used.

• Extract: Raw data (HTML, JSON, etc) is extracted from datasources like USDA, Wildflower, and ChatGPT.
• Transform: The fetched data is parsed and transformed into the fields that will appear in the output.
• Load: The data is loaded into the generated CSV or SQL files.

Setup

Install uv.

Usage

# Collect data about the plants in short.txt
uv run generate_plants_csv.py data/in/scientific-names/short.txt

# Print the collected data to the terminal
cat data/out/plants-short.csv

# Run tests
uv run pytest

# Run image picker
uv run image_picker.py data/in/scientific-names/all.txt

# Run a task directly
PYTHONPATH=. uv run luigi --local-scheduler --module tasks.datasources.usda.location TransformPlantZipcodes --scientific-name "ilex verticillata"