A small useful thing, built carefully.

Rootfast answers a simple question — I live here, what should I plant? — and answers it with data, not opinion.

Why this exists

The data already exists. USDA PLANTS knows which native species occur in every county. The Plant Hardiness Zone Map knows what survives the winter. The GBIF Backbone resolves the taxonomic mess across competing scientific authorities. Each is a beautiful piece of public infrastructure. None of them speak to each other in a useful way.

Rootfast joins them, on a canonical taxonomic key, and serves the result as a plain HTTP API. The hard work isn't novel — it's stewardship. We've kept every source citation, every confidence rating, every “USDA hasn't characterised this taxon yet.” The data is honest about what it knows and what it doesn't.

What it covers, today

Montana. 3,215 plant taxa, 56 counties, 31,191 distribution records, full USDA cultivation specs for the roughly 22% of plants USDA has formally characterised. Every record carries a GBIF taxon key so future sources (hardiness zones, iNaturalist observations, Wikidata cross-refs) join cleanly.

The pipeline is parameter-only away from nationwide expansion. It will get there. We're working in the open.

How it's built

A Python ETL fetches from USDA's undocumented public ArcGIS endpoints and REST API. A matcher calls GBIF's /species/match endpoint to assign each plant a canonical taxonomic key. The merged dataset is written to Cloudflare D1; a small TypeScript Worker serves the API. The site you're reading is Astro on Cloudflare Pages.

Code is MIT-licensed, data is CC0. The whole thing runs comfortably inside Cloudflare's free tier.

What's not here

Pollinator-value data is the largest gap — the best source (Xerces Society regional lists) is copyrighted, so we've parked it pending a permission request. State-level natural-heritage scrapes (e.g. the Montana Field Guide, which we built and then sidelined) are kept as future sibling APIs.

Nothing about climate, ecological community, succession, or stand-density is modelled. Rootfast doesn't tell you what to do with the data. It just gets the data out of PDFs and into your hands.