Save Plants

The Hunt is On: Searching for Rare Plants in the Golden State

Amy Patten, the California Native Plant Society’s new Rare Plant Treasure Hunt (RPTH) coordinator didn’t venture far to lead her first hunt – Mount Hermon in the Santa Cruz Sandhills is just behind her home. But the spaces closest to us often face great threats, and this holds true for the sandhills, where 40% of the lands have been lost to mining and other development and what remains is threatened by invasive plant species. Despite the threats, the area still supports a unique community of plants and animals very different from the evergreen forests surrounding it. This uniqueness is due to the outcrops of Zayante soils, which have low water and nutrient availability. One of the plants endemic to the sandhills was the target of Amy’s RPTH, the Ben Lomond buckwheat (Eriogonum nudum var. decurrens).

Amy and her co-leader Rebekah Boettcher, a naturalist from the Mount Hermon Association, led seven amazing volunteer botanists in their July search. As the group hiked through the coastal ponderosa pine forest up to the summit of the mountain, they checked areas with bare, sandy soil for their quarry, the umbels of creamy flowers and leafy green basal leaves of the buckwheat. And find them they did: expecting to only find the species in the small, isolated area where they’d been previously observed, the group was excited to find several thousand plants in the area!

Over his years of volunteering, Doug, the discoverer of the chaff-seed population has garnered a reputation as someone who finds new populations of plants every year. Recently he has expanded his volunteer role by taking a role on the Rhode Island Task Force professional advisory group. And he is just one of the 500 or so volunteers involved in the program. There is also Warren King, a plant enthusiast, who has been a PCV for 12 years and has been added to the Vermont Task Force professional advisory group. Warren has studied Eastern Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium vanbruntiae), another National Collection species, for many years, publishing his surveys and studies of this rare Vermont species in the Journal of the New England Botanical Club, Rhodora, earlier this year. Clearly the program tends to attract and retain passionate volunteers committed to conservation and the study of botany.

Key to retaining such dedicated volunteers, NEWFS works hard to give back to them. Every year field trips are planned for the PCVs to a site of botanical interest, often to an area where rare species are found. These field trips allow volunteers to lean about a specific species or ecosystem from a professional botanist. At their spring training, or refresher sessions, guest speakers come and give an educational or entertaining talk and the state heritage program staff are invited to come and talk directly with the volunteers. Each season ends with a “Wrap Up,” a volunteer appreciation event with a potluck and review of the field season. Wrap Ups provide space for volunteers to share stories and photos of their field season, reflect on what could be improved, and connect with all the other volunteers. NEWFS also recognizes the volunteer in each state who submits the most seed collections with a “Bountany” prize (a portmanteau of bounty and botany). They plan to further incentivize submission of survey forms this year by offering unique patches and stickers.

Like most plant life on the planet, rare plant species in New England face the four horsemen of the ecological apocalypse: habitat destruction, over-exploitation, climate change, and invasive species. The contributions of NEWFS’s volunteers over the past 25 years and future contributions will help provide information to improve management and conservation decisions for these rare plant species as they face these challenges. Running a regional rare plant monitoring program is a huge endeavor, and without the help of volunteers, the New England program could not exist at the scale it does today.

For more information about the PCV program, check out the NEWFS website.

Wandering Washington with Rare Care Volunteers

This July, the Tiffany Springs Campground in the Okanogan National Forest was briefly invaded by volunteer botanists. The 18 volunteers were gathered for the annual Monitoring Weekend event held by the University of Washington Botanic Gardens’ Rare Plant Care and Conservation (Rare Care) program. Each year a location with many historical records of rare plants that have not recently been visited is chosen for the volunteer crews to put their skills to work. Over the three days of this year’s event, the volunteers completed 35 reports for historical locations on 9 different species – making it the most productive Monitoring Weekend on record!

The event demonstrates the hard work and dedication of the volunteer citizen scientists which help power Rare Care. The volunteers are passionate about the natural world and plant conservation, and eager to help. The program recruits for three types of volunteer work: rare plant monitoring, seed collecting, and seed cleaning. But the bulk of the volunteer efforts go towards the monitoring efforts, with over 100 volunteers willing to navigate across remote areas of public – and sometimes private – lands, climb up cliffs, wade through head-high nettles, and brave the elements in search of rare plants. Though the volunteers are provided with training, including orienteering, the volunteers work on their own. Rare Care staff provide them any historical data and maps, but it is their responsibility to research the plant ahead of their trip, be able to correctly identify it from possible look-a-likes in the area, research how to best reach their site, and then of course take all the monitoring data.

The data volunteers collect are then shared with the Washington Natural Heritage Program to update inventories on rare plant populations across the state, and will be used for land management decisions and conservation planning. Rare plant monitors perform one of the critical first steps of conservation by visiting known populations of rare plants, collecting data on the population, and reporting any threats observed during the visit. In many cases these sites haven’t been visited in over a decade or more.

For some species of interest, monitoring may be more frequent than others. A couple of ongoing Rare Care monitoring projects with various partners are centered around species that area also in the CPC National Collection: Wenatchee Mountain checkermallow (Sidalcea oregana var. calva) and Whited’s milk-vetch (Astragalus sinuatus). Both these species are endemic to the Wenatchee region and face various threats, from development to changes in fire regimes.

Wenatchee Mountain checkermallow is a perennial herb with beautiful pink inflorescences. Federally listed as endangered, the species occurs in only five locations. Partnering with the Department of Natural Resources, each year Rare Care volunteers count individual plants and map populations in order to study population trends over time.

Whited’s milk-vetch known from only eight populations scattered along only a couple of drainages. Rare Care volunteers have been working with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to monitor the largest of these populations through annual counts of individual plants in permanent transects and tracking the different life stages to better understand recruitment and mortality. Back at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, seeds have been propagated for outplantings with the BLM.