Houseplant Care & Pet-Toxicity Lookup 🌿 — GBIF + ASPCA

Look up structured houseplant data — care metrics and pet safety — for any plant name. Unlike a generic plant API, this Actor understands houseplant care: it verifies each name against the GBIF Taxonomic Backbone, computes quantitative light (Lux), watering, temperature, and humidity metrics, and joins ASPCA dog/cat toxicity — with a source URL on every record so any fact is re-verifiable.

Turn a plant list (your app catalog, nursery inventory, or care guide) into one clean, structured houseplant dataset you can export to CSV, JSON, or Excel.

What this Actor does

• 🌱 Quantitative care — light category mapped to a standard Lux band, plus watering-day interval, temperature range, and target humidity per plant.
• 🐾 ASPCA pet toxicity — dog/cat determinations with clinical signs. toxicity_status is aspca_verified, conservatively aspca_genus_inferred, or unknown — never guessed "safe".
• 🔗 GBIF-verified taxonomy — accepted canonical names, synonyms preserved, and a gbif_source_url to re-verify each record.
• 📋 Curated default list — run with no input to look up a bundled set of ~270 popular houseplants, or pass your own plantNames.
• 🎚️ Honest quality flags — every row carries care_confidence so you can filter to exactly the rows you trust.
• 🔎 Filters — by family, pet-safe only, or species-verified toxicity only.

Output — one item per plant

Field	Description
scientific_name, synonym_scientific_name	GBIF-accepted name + trade synonym
common_name, family	Common name + GBIF-verified family
light_requirement_level, min_lux, max_lux	Light category + Lux band
watering_frequency_days	Watering interval in days
min_temp_celsius, max_temp_celsius, ideal_humidity_percent	Climate targets
is_toxic_to_dogs, is_toxic_to_cats, is_toxic_to_horses	ASPCA flags (blank = unknown)
toxicity_symptoms, toxicity_status	Clinical signs + where the toxicity came from
care_confidence	high / medium / low data-quality grade
gbif_usage_key, gbif_source_url, retrieved_at, dataset_version	Full provenance

Export from the dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel, or via API.

Input

Run with no input to look up the built-in curated houseplant list, or configure:

{
  "plantNames": ["Monstera deliciosa", "Snake Plant", "Peace Lily"],
  "maxPlants": 25,
  "filterFamily": "Araceae",
  "onlyPetSafe": false,
  "onlyToxicityVerified": false,
  "requestDelaySecs": 1.0
}

How it works

1. For each plant name, verify it against the GBIF backbone (accepted name, family, synonyms).
2. Compute category-normalized care metrics (light category → Lux band; watering/temp/humidity from plant-type norms).
3. Join ASPCA pet-toxicity, applying safe-direction genus inference where a species isn't individually listed.
4. Push one clean, provenanced record per plant to the dataset.

Use cases

• Plant-ID and plant-care apps (structured care + pet-safety data).
• IoT smart planters — Lux targets and watering intervals as machine values.
• "Is this plant safe for my cat?" features backed by ASPCA determinations.
• ML / RAG corpora and plant data APIs.

FAQ

Which plants does it support? Any plant name GBIF can resolve. Pass your own plantNames or use the bundled curated list of ~270 popular houseplants.

Where does the data come from? Taxonomy is verified live against the public GBIF API; toxicity uses the public ASPCA Animal Poison Control toxic/non-toxic determinations; care metrics are a deterministic normalization ruleset.

Why are some fields empty? Coverage is honest — toxicity is unknown (never "safe") when a plant isn't on the ASPCA list, and care_confidence grades every row. Use onlyToxicityVerified or onlyPetSafe when you need complete safety data.

Can I get the whole thing as a ready-made dataset? Yes — a curated snapshot of 270 houseplants (hand-verified care, 891 ASPCA toxicity records, a 20,000+ species taxonomic index, and enrichment) in SQLite + CSV + JSON, plus custom feeds, is available separately: houseplants-botanical-floradb.pages.dev · floradb.hardhat456@simplelogin.com.

Toxicity data is informational, not veterinary advice.

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Keywords: houseplant scraper, plant care data, ASPCA pet toxicity, toxic plants for cats and dogs, houseplant dataset, GBIF taxonomy, plant care API, indoor plant data, lux light requirements.