BONAP as Snapshot in Time
January 5, 2026
Here is a small part of an interview with David McKinney, Curator of Collections and Grounds at Iowa Arboretum and Gardens, on the Dec 5, 2025 episode of the Native Plants, Healthy Planet podcast that I thought was worth noting:
Fran Chismar, one of the hosts: "What are your thoughts on BONAP with how accurate it is?"
McKinney: "Yeah. BONAP, like you said, it's a wonderful tool. However, for most counties, it's a survey of the native plants as a snapshot at that point in time. And as we know ecosystems and plants are dynamic and so it doesn't account for the fact that plants move over time and that populations change in response to climactic factors, in response to natural disasters, into deer pressure...All of these factors Bonap does not take into account; it's just a survey. And so if you're using data from the [...] 1870s, like what a lot of Iowa surveys were started with, you're seeing what was native in that county in 1870 and oftentimes they were using common names because they didn't have Latin names for some of these plants they were discovering for the first time and sometimes those things have been speciated out, they've undergone taxonomic changes, and in some cases, after farming, those plants are no longer native to that county because they can't be found anymore. Or in the instance of my Dodecatheon, right, unless they had been surveying in that county after a fresh burn the likelihood of them finding that plant growing in a tall-grass prairie would have been zilch. And so it's a great tool, it's a great snapshot in time, but it's not the definitive decider about whether or not a plant is native to that particular place and time. Particularly if you look at the interruption of colonialism coming to this continent, we don't know where these plants would have traveled to historically after these snapshots in time."