By Frank Landis, CNPS-SD Conservation Committee ChairI’m in a weird headspace at the moment. Supposedly, I should be thinking about how to recruit people to do rare plant surveys in 2021, despite the abysmal rain and general paucity of plants. On the other three hands (I recruited my wife to help), I’m doing conservation, so the question of “how to get interested citizens involved in rare plant science takes on a rather...different perspective. So, let’s go with it. You, dear reader, want to get involved with California rare native plants. What should you do?First, you need to understand the scope of the problem. According to Jon Rebman of SDNHM, San Diego County has around 1,700 native plant species (this is species, not subspecies or varieties, and not non-natives. Add that all in and the count goes over 2,700). According to the CNPS rare plants inventory, around 290 of those species are in some way sensitive, 16 are listed as rare threatened or endangered, and over 200 are listed as CRPR list 1B or 2B, meaning they could be listed as threatened or endangered in California.But wait, it gets worse. At 1,700 native species, San Diego County has more native species than the state of Hawai’i. Or either of the Dakotas. Or even Alaska, for that matter. At 4,207 square miles of land, we’re not quite 200 square miles bigger than the Big Island of Hawai’i (4,028 square miles). And while the Big Island is home to around 185,000 people, San Diego’s home to over 3,338,000 people, or not quite 20 times the population density.