The October meeting of the California Native Plants Society will take place on Thursday evening, October 5th, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm at the SLO Vets’ Hall, 801 Grand Ave. in San Luis Obispo.

The first half of the meeting will be devoted to a California native seed exchange. If you have an interest in planting native seeds and/or have native seeds to share with others, you are asked to come prepared to participate. During the  meetings, seed traders will share their tips on how to plant the seeds and grow the plants, they brought to share.

The second half of the meeting will feature presentations by local members, reporting on botanical places of interest they visited during the summer. Join us for refreshments (please bring a dessert to share) and some exciting photographs and stories of forays into the wild. If you would like to present some of your tales of discovery out in nature, bring your photos in a viewable format to the meeting, on a thumb drive, or you can e-mail your photos to David Chipping (dchippin@calpoly.edu), 24 hours before the meeting. Dave can also answer any questions about formatting your photos.

Sunday, Oct. 22^nd, 2:00-4:00 pm, iNaturalist Workshop, San Luis Obispo Botanical Garden

Have you ever thought about keeping track of your own nature observations in an organized way so you could refer back to them? What if you could easily do that, as well as share your observations and photographs taken in nature, with a group of like-minded people online? Would you like to make meaningful contributions to scientific research? “Citizen science” is ordinary people contributing to scientific research and iNaturalist is the place to get started with any or all of the above.

Join us to discuss how to use the iNaturalist website and mobile applications, what the options are, and how to customize your iNaturalist account for your personal interests. This workshop, led by Damon Tighe and Bill Waycott, will be a combination of hands-on classroom and field work.

In preparation for the workshop, please sign up for an iNaturalist account online and create your profile. If you plan to use your mobile device(s), download and install the mobile app(s) on Android and IOS, prior to the workshop.  After the classroom component, we will visit the garden to use iNaturalist in real-time.  The SLO Botanical Garden is located in Chorro Regional Park, off of Hwy 1, across from Cuesta College and adjacent to the Dairy Creek Golf Course.