 So this event is hosted by the Kentucky Native Plant Society. We are a non-profit statewide organization that focuses on preservation, protection, and conservation of native plants and natural communities. So I'm just going to go right into Dr. Allen Weekly's introduction because we want to hear from Allen. So Dr. Allen Weekly, he is my, personally one of my favorite botanists in the country, in the world actually, prominent southeastern botanists. He's a plant taxonomist, community ecologist, and conservationist specializing in the southeastern United States flora. So I think what's really interesting about Allen is that he is so many different things. You know, he's a heritage botanist, taxonomist, a professor, you know, works with so many different groups across the state to push some of these conservation issues. And on top of all that, he's created an awesome flora of the southeast, which also includes the whole entire state of Kentucky. So I'm looking forward to Allen maybe letting us know how much of Kentucky really is in the southeast as a longstanding argument that we are below the Ohio River. So we, so Allen is the author, I said, of the flora of the southeastern United States. So if you haven't seen that, definitely check that out. Various floras of different states like the flora of Virginia, and wildflower books like wildflowers of the Atlantic southeast. He's released an app called FloraQuest, which I use frequently. It's much easier to use an app in the field than carry around large books. So that's been a great resource. He's done so many studies and mentored so many different people over the years. He's very active with the Flora of North American Project and the United States National Vegetation Classification. And he serves as an advisor to North Carolina Heritage Program and the North Carolina Plant Conservation Program. So very similar to a lot of the folks here today. He's also the co-founder of the Carolina Vegetation Survey, which we heard about from Devin's talk, starting to use that CDS methodology. And as a trustee and board member of the public and private conservation granting agencies, he has helped oversee $400 million of land conservation grants in the southeastern United States. So this is huge. Really land acquisition is kind of the ultimate conservation goal is, you know, protection of land. And then all of the other conservation strategies come after that. So without further ado, I'm really excited to hear from Dr. Alan Weekly. Well, thanks, Tara. I'm a little embarrassed by that introduction. I'm blushing, if you can tell. But anyway, it's great to be here with you all. And it's been great to hear the talks this morning and to also look around at the set of people who are attending and see so many friends and acquaintances and colleagues that I've worked with and so forth. So I will jump on in, share screen. Do you see a marshalia? Okay, great. Okay, so I'm gonna, my talk is sort of roughly divided into a couple of sections. And the first I'm gonna talk primarily about kind of the evolution of the southeastern flora. And that has important implications for us and understanding also how to go about conservation. And I'm going to talk about tools for identifying plants in the southeast. And sort of woven all through is going to be a basic conservation theme, which in my personal philosophy is the fundamental reason why I do all this. Conservation is really the foundation and the bottom line. So the vascular plants of the southeastern United States, there are about 6,900 native species, about 3,000 alien species, fortunately only a small percentage of those are invasive and problematic. And interestingly also a few hundred where we don't really know whether they're native or alien. So that's kind of an interesting set. But when we look at the southeastern United States, we see really high species diversity. This is a map from the bone app project showing areas of high species diversity. You can see these sort of scattered areas around the southeast, including parts of Kentucky, and also of course, California, the Sierra Nevadas and the coastal areas. When we jump up a taxonomic rank to the genus level, the map looks quite similar. But when we jump up one further rank to the family level, the map changes pretty substantially. And we see that the diversity at this higher taxonomic level is really heavily weighted towards the southeastern United States. And why is that? It's a really interesting thing that California beats us on species diversity, but we beat California on family diversity. What's going on there? So it's related to ancient lineages and resilience through deep time. If we look at plant narrow endemics, California, the Appalachians, parts of the coastal plain. If we look at tree diversity, you always hear the stuff about the Smokies having such great tree diversity, but nobody talks about the Red Hills of Alabama. It's just not fair. If we look at the group of plants called the Paleo-Dicots, that's like magnolias and water lilies and cerurus, lizard's tail, things like that, the southeast is also really, really rich. And this also has to do with its ancient status as a relic area holding temperate biodiversity, a major center of temperate biodiversity. Native grasses, you think, oh, that's going to be out in the Great Plains where all the diversity is, but no, the southeast is also rich, including parts of Kentucky. And I hope, I know it's the Native Plant Society, but I hope you'll let me slip a few animals in here as well. If we look at amphibian diversity or reptile diversity or fish diversity, we also see that the southeast is where it's at. And karst, as you all well know in Kentucky, karst diversity, the southeast is also really rich in diversity of underground organisms, cave and underground aquifer organisms. So when you sort of put this all together as nature serve has done into a map of biodiversity importance, the southeast is really a highlighted area. But I also want you to notice that it's not evenly distributed around the southeast. It's very patchy and every one of these little patches has its own distinct richness of biodiversity that's different from the other patches. So the Edwards Plateau or the Florida Panhandle or the Kentucky Bluegrass or the Southern Blue Ridge, all these have their own independent biodiversity. So how has the southeast developed and retained this biodiversity? I guess I'm going to suggest that it is edific diversity, that is geology and soils, times climate diversity, particularly rainfall and temperature, times fire regime diversity, and then times time, both a really deep time of hundreds of millions of years and also more recent time of the time since the last Ice Age. And so maybe sometimes we think of the southeast as kind of mostly looking like this, kind of boring really. Lots of different trees, not a lot of herbs, it's a nice forest to take a hike through, but sort of where is that biodiversity? Well, a lot of the biodiversity in the south is in the small patch communities, the specialized communities that harbor a lot of these relics, such as rock houses in the upper left or longleaf pine and other fire-maintained pine land communities across the southeast, or rock crop communities such as the granite flat rock in Georgia there on the lower left, or high elevation summit communities like Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. And so we can kind of describe the underlying diversity that supports that biodiversity, that has created that biodiversity in the old-fashioned earth, air, fire, water kind of paradigm. But we also have to add in kind of the crazy clock of time that has sort of altered and shifted all this in really critical ways. So it's not that the southeast is static, the change in the southeast is both, it's a, how do we put it? It's not just a bug, it's also a feature. And so if we look at the diversity of physiographic provinces in the southeast, we have a lot of physiographic provinces. If we look at geology such as this map of Alabama, we have tremendous diversity in the coastal plain, but then also in Piedmont, Blue Ridge, and the sedimentary rock provinces that predominate in Kentucky. And we have a fair bit of elevational diversity, not like out in the west, but a fair bit, enough to matter. And we have a bit of precipitation diversity with some of some temperate rainforest areas in parts of the southeast. And we also have diversity of fire regimes. This shows mean fire return, enterable, and all of that dark red and orange and so forth covering most of the southeast means that the more fire exposed parts of that landscape receives really frequent fire or received really frequent fire evolutionarily every two years, every four years, every five years. But it doesn't mean that every bit of that landscape got that there were fire refuge areas that were sheltered from fire and so forth. So high fire frequency across the southeastern region basically is another driver of diversity because it means that there's a diversity of fire regimes in areas that have high fire regime in their most exposed sorts of settings like dry ridge tops in the Cumberlands and so forth. So it's also, I think, important for us to remember that the southeastern United States has been available for the occupancy of land plants since there were land plants constantly. It has never been under ice or entirely under water, et cetera. So it has been a refugium from ice ages from periods of high sea level and so forth. And this is an artist's rendition of Archeanthus. And I think many of you all will be able to recognize what this might be related to. It's actually a close relative of Tulip Tree. This is from 115 million years ago in the southeastern United States. So it's fun to be able to time travel back. And people always talk about inventing a time machine, but it's really disappointing that nobody has actually gotten around to doing it. I can think of about, I don't know, a thousand times in places that I wish I could take that time machine back to. So a reminder of Archeanthus' modern derivative. But more recently, of course, we've also gone through massive climate changes, the Pleistocene Ice Age and so forth, which shifted things around. And so I just want to emphasize that the climate has never been static. The southeast has gone through shifts. Those do result in extinctions, but they also result in evolution of new species. And so Kentucky 15,000 years ago maybe looked like this. So we have this permutational kind of combinatorial diversity of each of these different kind of factors and so forth. It means that each place on the earth is somewhat unique or is unique. And a really good botanist you could take and blindfold her and take on a helicopter ride and drop off somewhere and take the blindfold off. And she'd look around and say, oh, well, I must be in X County. That's how specific the biodiversity around the region is. So I want to go through a couple of kind of examples of these diverse areas. So the diversity in the southeast is local in space. Any field biologist for heritage programs and so forth who's gone about looking for for rare species will tell you they're not just sort of randomly scattered across the landscape. They're in these little small patches. And you walk through a lot of pretty boring woods sometimes to get to the small patch that has all the rare species. So the raisins and the chocolate chips in the cookie, not that the cookies bad itself. But diversity is also local in time. And this is I think a lot harder for us to think about the the important factor of time. And so the combination of those gives us this kind of crazy quilt of diversity in the southeastern United States. And I guess the one of the one of the messages I want to get across is this is sort of exemplified by this slide. So the red areas are really high areas of endemism, the orange kind of next highest and to the two shades of yellow. And Kentucky is in here and it has a good bit of that endemism and so forth. And as we have gone through climate changes in the past where cold and moisture climates have pushed down from the south, such as during places to see inglation, or when warm and dry conditions have pushed in from the west, or when more tropical conditions have pushed in from the south, they move in and then they move back out. The climate changes again back to sort of our more standard climate of where we are on the earth. But when those climates change, the species change too, they migrate. So we get cold boreal species that move south, or we get dry adapted grasses moving in from the great plains in the west, or we get tropical species moving up from the west indies in Mexico. And when the conditions change back, do all those species just dutifully trot home? No, they get scraped off in odd little micro habitats and so forth. And when they get scraped off in those places, if they stay there long enough, they evolve into new species. So the change is both a threat to biodiversity, but it's also a generator of biodiversity. So when we see these patterns, these patterns often reflect these relictual areas where biodiversity has been sort of scraped off and left behind and then has evolved further. So trillium discolor along the Savannah River, I think it grows pretty much exactly where it grew at the height of place to see inglation. It's mostly right along the river in the river valley. And there might have been spruce fir forest around it on the uplands, but there wasn't spruce fir forest where it was growing right along the Savannah River. So that relictual habitat retained that species. And then most species, the ones that aren't dispersed by ants, which is not a real good strategy for speed. Most species then were able to move back out across the landscape. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples. One is high elevation Rocky Summit habitats in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and some of the endemic species we have there, like GM radiate of the mountain avans. Well, this is the kind of habitat it grows in. And this is what Tara would be doing if she was in North Carolina. But this is the distribution of the species. It grows only on about 15 different mountaintops. And it's sibling to two species, GM peckii. It's up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and in Nova Scotia. And GM calfifolium in British Columbia, Alaska, out the allusions to Sakaline and Northern Japan. This is actually a picture of GM calfifolium and Hokkaido in Japan. And so these are sibling species, close relatives, but GM radiate, I'm having been left behind here in the Southern Appalachians has evolved into its own species. Tricophorum cespitosum, the deer hair, likewise growing almost always with GM radiatum, but it hasn't speciated. It's related to common populations all through Canada. So a very common species that is just disjunct down to the Southern Appalachians. Houstonia montana. Now this one occurs is even rare than the other two and occurs on even fewer mountaintops has this sort of bushy habit and brighter pink flowers than its sibling Houstonia perperea, a common southeastern species. So when we look at the some of the rare species in these high elevation outcrops, they have this strong signal of both new endemics and old endemics and unspeciated disjuncts like the tricophorum that are recruited from very old circumborial lineages kind of things that you generally that you would find in in the Arctic of Canada or Sweden or Russia or England, Rotodendron, Sibaldia, GM, etc. There's some really strong Asian affinities and that's related to the connection of North America, the closer connection of North America to Asia than to Europe, but there are also young species of warm temperate or even tropical kind of lineages that are have been long separated from Eurasia, Houstonia, Kalmia, etc. So it's not surprising the boreal aspect when you think that not that many tens of thousands of years ago, the high mountains of North Carolina and Virginia had tundra and had many of these northern species. So a second example, serpentine barons. These occur in western North Carolina and in a situation where topographic situation and elevation situation where you would expect to have cove forest or montane oak forests with white oak and northern red oak and so forth what you have instead is this. It's kind of cosmically weird. So the reason is the underlying substrate, the odd serpentine chemistry of the rock and the soils derived from the rock. And so in these serpentine barons we have these disjuncts of western and northern grasses like tufted hairgrass, slender wheatgrass, elemus trachea callus, spiroblous heteroleapus, prairie drop seed, disjuncts, mulenbergia glomerata, more northeastern poasulchuensis, a more northeastern species, genitianopsis crinida. Parnassia grandifolia, very weird scattered distribution around the southeast. This is currently under study and may actually turn out to be several species. There's some preliminary evidence that this is actually more than one species and will need to be broken up, split apart into several species. But we also have endemics like symbiotricum rianan, the buck creek aster that occurs only at a single serpentine baron. And at that same site, packera serpenticula just named in 2014. And now we're working on three additional endemic species to this one serpentine baron, a hexa stylus with very tightly closed mouth of the flower, clonal growth, not very much the variegation of the leaves with these long style extensions that are different than hexa stylus erypholia variety rupii or hexa stylus erypholia variety erypholia. And it also has a distinctive molecular signature, these two samples from buck creek showing some amino acid positions that differ from any of the other samples of that complex. So in these serpentine barons, we have a lot of western taxa that moved in in the past during hot and dry periods, got orphaned and left behind because of the odd geology at the buck creek serpentine baron. And some of them have evolved into neo endemics. And others are remain as just disjunct populations. Okay, closer to home for those of you, the Kentuckians among you. So these Cumberland plateau rock houses have also a very interesting flora. This one, Mononuria Cumberlandensis Cumberland sandwort, very narrow endemic here in the big south fork area, Tennessee and Kentucky. It's sister to the broadly Appalachian Mononuria glabra. By the way, for a species named only a couple of decades ago, this one has been entered into the genus frequent flyer program. It's been earning a lot of mileage. Having been originally named an air and area moved to Minnewartia moved to Mononuria and is about to be moved to porcidia. So yeah, frequent flyer miles. Stenanthium diffusum, narrow endemic also in the big south fork area, sister to the more widespread but sort of oddly scattered rock stenanthium griminium. The Silenis, Tony Romano mentioned one of these. So the rock house catch fly Silenia rotundifolia mostly restricted to these rock house kind of communities, not entirely so. So sister to Silenia regia and Silenia virginica. So to somewhat more widespread and common relatives, well the regia not really more common. And then Hucroparva flora, this gets into sort of new taxonomic research and also using traditional and new methods like molecular techniques. So Ryan Folk studied this a few years ago and what had been considered to be a single species widespread from North Carolina out to the Ozarks. He split into three species, one with two varieties and in Kentucky you all have Hucroparva flora, variety parva flora and also Hucro-Mazuriensis. So Mazuriensis here is with the triangle Southern Indiana and Illinois and this area of Kentucky. And then we have Hucroparva flora, variety parva flora more widespread through the Cumberland Plateau area but then disjunct over into North Carolina, a separate variety endemic to the Piedmont and a separate species out in the Ozarks. Geography is destiny. When plants or animals get stranded somewhere they change and they evolve and become new species. Another critter, sorry I can't resist letting them in as well, but I want to make a particular point about this. If we look at the distribution of Hucroparva flora, Cumberland Plateau here and then disjunct over into the Blue Ridge escarpment along the North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia tri-corner and the distribution of the green salamander Aeneides Aeneas, Cumberland Plateau disjunct over into that same area. It should give us pause, it should make us think a little bit. Why would a salamander and a saxophrage or a crag jangle, an alum root, have the same distribution? Well that's telling us something, that's telling us that there's a similarity of habitat but also a similarity of evolutionary history there. And so the green salamander is actually in the process of being split up into multiple species. This paper came out just a couple of years ago last year, 2019, which separated the hickory nut Gorge salamander. The botanists among us will appreciate the name Aeneides caria ensis as a new endemic and it is this branch in the molecular tree and there are three other major clades, a southern Cumberland, a northern Cumberland and an escarpment clade. And so as the authors wrote, Aeneides Aeneas has been petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act and our study highlights the need for conservation management of this complex. Our formal recognition of the extent of genetic and evolutionary diversification of the complex is a critical step in establishing conservation strategies. In these rock houses we also have things like Hupersia paraffila, sibling to the Circumboreal Hupersia Cilego complex. And then we have the Filmy ferns. What's with the damn Filmy ferns? Why do we have tropical ferns in Kentucky? There's something wrong here. So Vandenbashi Abashiana, Didama Glossum, Peterzii, doesn't make it to Kentucky. Hymenophilum tailoriii, somebody needs to find that. A lot of these Filmy ferns are mainly found by bryologists because they they look a lot like liverworts and mosses and grow in the same kinds of habitats. And crepidomines and trichatum grotto felt. So these Filmy ferns, these three, four species of Filmy fern are in very different lineages of Filmy fern that have been separate for over a hundred million years. Now we don't really know when they arrived in the Southern Appalachians and when they speciated there, but they appear to be old tropical relics. And then we have things like the Lamshade spider. East Asia, Eastern North America and Northwestern North America. That's a pattern that we see over and over again. So the Lamshade spiders. So a recent molecular study of Lamshade spiders found what they described as fractal genetic structuring. Essentially every rock outcrop had its own genetically distinct population of Lamshade spiders because they can't move from one rock outcrop to another. And so they've been there on each individual rock outcrop isolated and evolving on their own. So they recommended that there will be some splitting in the Lamshade spiders as well. Hypokylus, Pococci, and all will get split up. So these rock houses, they have these ancient tropical lineages of ferns. They have northern cryophils, cold adapted things, spiders and club mosses and all, warm temperate recent derivatives. And I think all this is because they are so buffered from extremes. They basically have this kind of near constant climate where they don't really freeze. They don't really get very hot. They stay constantly moist and the moisture further buffers the temperature. So I think all this has implications for how we think about conservation. I won't read this whole quote, but Alan Graham in talking about past ecosystem dynamics, he said, what we are actually additionally doing is setting aside way stations. We're, even if biodiversity changes in a particular place, those places that have held on to biodiversity in the past basically show a resilience and a hope for the future and holding into biodiversity currently in our sixth extinction. So we have areas like the Florida Panhandle sticky spot. So here we have the Apalachicola River bluffs with things like taxis and taurea and sort of ancient circumborial lineages. We have the Apalachicola National Forest savannas with all these tropical and subtropical related taxa that have been written there. We have this area in Washington and Bay counties with all these are different habitats, moist bluffs, saturated savannas. These are mainly sand hills, really dry habitats and also seasonally flooded lime sink ponds. And yet they're all jammed in together here. So this suggests that this part of the Panhandle of Florida is this ancient relictual area that has been able to hold on to lots of different kinds of biodiversity through time and through change. If we want to bet where we're going to be able to conserve biodiversity into the future, it helps to pay attention to where biodiversity has been conserved in the past. So I'm at an age where I get mailings from my 401k and so forth, and they always have this sort of phrase, past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because this stock or this mutual fund gained 20% last year doesn't mean it's going to gain 20% next year. But I'd like to suggest that in biodiversity conservation, past performance is an indicator of future results because it shows where the landscape has a kind of resilience because of its ability to withstand climate change and retain and generate new biodiversity. And I'll close this section of the talk with this quote from Charles Darwin, there is a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. So I'm going to move into the second section of my talk, which is really about kind of flora and describing new diversity and so forth. And I'm going to start with the idea that you can't conserve what you don't know about or if you manage to conserve what you don't know about, you did it by accident and we can't really, we don't really want to leave conservation to accident. And so taxonomic science is a foundation for conservation and we've been able to persuade funders at UNC of that to fund taxonomic science because of its importance for conservation. And so in the talks this morning we talked about species as conservation targets and also communities and that sort of fine filter course filter dual approach I think gives us the best opportunity to identify the most important conservation areas and work to conserve them. So species are drivers of conservation action where where species are and so forth. And I think it's important in conservation that we avoid both type one or type two errors. Many of you probably know that language, some of you maybe don't, but but a type one versus a type two error and the type one error, do I remember which is which? Anyway, it's if we think something is really rare and we try to do conservation there but it turns out that it wasn't a good species, we sort of wasted resources on it. Or if we didn't know that something existed, we hadn't described it, we didn't know that there was a rare species there or we hadn't done the heritage style inventory to find that occurrence and it gets destroyed without us even knowing about it that's a lost opportunity. So you know sort of wasted effort versus lost opportunity with conservation resources being as precious as they are, as limited as they are, we can't afford either. And so a lot of what I do is oriented towards trying to help us not make either of those kinds of errors. So Jenkins in 2015 based on vertebrate animals and on a few tree species basically identified these priority areas where a lot of conservation was not, a lot of biodiversity was not conserved. And you see the same theme of the west coast but then very broadly the southeast and all. So if you look at plant species that have been named over the last decades in the southeastern United States, about 500 species have been named since 1970. And that's about 10% of the native flora. And when I tell people this they're often kind of shocked it's like oh gosh you know we've been doing taxonomy in the eastern United States for centuries. Haven't we gotten it all figured out aren't we asymptoting towards the end don't we know everything there is to know. And the sort of both frustrating and exciting thing is no we don't there's a lot of new stuff out there there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been described. And most of the new species that are getting described are narrow endemics they're in heritage lingo G1 G2 G3 species they're the highly most highly imperiled highly imperiled and and imperiled species the species that are most at risk of extinction. And if we look across the southeast as a whole at the G1 G3 species across the region something like 50% of the of the these most highly imperiled species have been named in the last 50 years. So you know we got white oak right and we got other things named a couple hundred years ago but we're still finding a lot of these new things and getting them described. And so no we're not going towards being done in fact the number of new species being named by decade is sloping up and part of that is due to new techniques like molecular systematics but mainly it's due to biologists getting out and getting to these specialized habitats and looking with the recognition that there might be a new species there. So you can't find what you don't believe is there so part of it is believing. So there was mentioned earlier I think by Tara about trillium pustulum and and so forth the trillium pustulum complex is in the process of being split up each of these colors will be its own species most likely some of the work is still being done Trillium Georgianum here just a couple of remnant sites remaining in North Georgia is has been named some of these others are in the process of being named Ozarkanum and Texanum in the West have been named before. Tulip trees something as familiar as tulip trees Carl Federer my grad student did molecular sampling of this we think there will be three taxa probably one at new species down in Florida and then two varieties named for the rest of the southeast a new highly imperiled blue curl tricostominesophilum we just got described last year it occurs on on the main capes in northern South Carolina Cape Hatteras Cape Fear Cape Lookout Cape Fear and Cape Romaine and in Kentucky there's been a steady stream of new species being named through time this is about the last 40 years of of new species name that occur in Kentucky and we're not done I'm going to probably move past this slide quickly before anybody complains that their favorite new species is and on here or whatever but lots of new things coming up that are being worked on and will get described and once they are described many of these will be narrow endemics and they will shape the conservation agenda in Kentucky and beyond but I don't want to focus just on naming new species there's also the what I call taxonomic resurrections and changes in status and this is one that was mentioned earlier and I threw this slide in while I was listening so Baptisia aberrans the the aberrant southern Baptist blue wild indigo has been lumped often into Baptisia australis or lumped into Baptisia minor and as such it doesn't have that high a conservation status when you look at its G rank but when you recognize that it is actually its own separate species its G rank becomes you know indicates a much more highly imperiled status and a higher conservation priority for Kentuckians and other states that are looking at this species so now I want to talk about tools for identifying plants for understanding the flora and you know I said earlier you can't conserve what you don't know exists but I guess I also want to emphasize that you can't conserve what you can't identify and scientific papers describing new species you know the ones that pertain to the southeastern United States I think in the bibliography of my flora there's about 6500 references so that isn't very practical people can't go to 6500 scientific papers many of which are paywalled by the scientific publishers anyway so so what you need is flora's field guides apps etc things to help you identify plants so um this is a picture of me when I was five and some of you all will recognize the plant that I'm playing as a trumpet it's a highly hallucinogenic and toxic plant my parents knew a lot about plants and they really shouldn't probably have been letting me do this but they did some people might say that it explains a lot but but I grew up in a family that that spent a lot of time outdoors and we always had Peterson field guides and I first started identifying plants while I was taught them by my grandmother and my parents and my aunt and all but I first started identifying them using a Peterson field guide and then by the time I was in my teens I started using the flora of West Virginia I grew up in Virginia but I spent a lot of time without electricity on some land that my aunt owned up in Winchester County Frederick County near Winchester Virginia and she had a copy of the flora of West Virginia that the original edition of it are the original printings and so flora's and field guides and apps nowadays apps are where sort of the rubber meets the road in terms of of enabling people to access information about the plants around them you don't access it by going to the herbarium you don't access it by reading those six thousand scientific papers you access it through some that synthesizes that information and so you know late in my teens I started working with the flora of the carolinas at the time it was sort of brand new and you know the flora of North America is 30 volumes that's not very practical increasingly there are apps and wonderful wildflower guides like this one for Georgia done by Linda Chaffin so when we wrote the flora of Virginia it was the first new flora for the state in 250 years here's the old flora of Virginia and here's the new one and John Clayton came and visited when we when we had our our party for the new flora but what I found is that what everyone really wants is a tricorder they don't want a flora they want they want a magical device that they can point at a plant and it'll tell them what it is and you know we're sort of working on that and and there've been there were various mentions of iNaturalist I'll just talk I won't talk a lot about iNaturalist but I'll mention it but iNaturalist with its artificial intelligence machine learning approach to identifying plants you know is sort of taking us in the direction of the tricorder but it'll never really get there with a lot of the species that we have to identify it does a pretty amazing job on on a lot of species so I want to talk about sort of floras and apps and so forth and and introduce you to some of these so um so I've been working on these for a number for about 30 years now well last uh 18 at UNC and we came up with a way of of developing these kinds of tools basically by creating a database from which the tools are derived rather than writing a flora by typing it in using microsoft word we have information in a database that then we can export in various forms and formats so that's called the flora manager and from it has come the flora of virginia the flora of virginia app the flora quest app the wildflowers of the atlantic southeast wildflower guide and and soon we will have the a sort of the even newer southeastern flora which i'll talk about in a few minutes so this is kind of what the entries some of the entry screens look like it's just in access right now we'll probably put it in in an sql format soon but basically these are sort of the entry screens and so forth that you can tap on you get this for you grow part of a flora so you can enter in habitat and distribution and comments and phenology and this is the synonymy and you can click here to view or edit the distribution here's the keys that lead to it so you can access the key directly from this screen the entry screen for distribution looks like this you can tap in different places in each of these boxes and indicate whether it's common uncommon rare whether it's native or alien or uncertain and all and also record information about its endemism and so forth and and then there's basically this is how you output information so you can create a derivative flora by choosing your geography just choosing your taxonomy choosing what maps you want to use choosing whether you want to insert photos into the into the format what sections you want to include etc and optional fields that you can include like Arkansas remarks or Shenandoah national park comments so that's sort of the basis for all these things so the flora of virginia app we developed a couple of years ago with my colleagues in virginia at the virginia national heritage program and it has a number of great features one of which particularly I want to introduce to those of you aren't familiar with it and that's the graphic key so it has dichotomous keys it has the standard kind of dichotomous keys but it also has this graphic key it has lots of illustrations it enables you to do geographic filtering by where you are in the state of virginia if you enter in your counter county it will basically filter the results for species that you're likely to encounter in that area so if you were working in southeastern Kentucky you could use this app and enter in lee county virginia the southwestern most county of virginia and it would work great it has essentially all the content of the flora virginia book but you have it on your phone and it's a pretty expensive app it is available in in both platforms and a major upgrade is about to be result released in the next couple of weeks and if you already have the app it'll basically just refresh with that new content so the graphic key is basically a an elaboration of an idea that first came up about 30 or 40 years ago and people did it using punch cards and holes punched in them and so forth but it's basically a polyclave where rather than a dichotomous key where you get asked some question about some feature that you don't have your plant is in flower and it wants to know what the fruit type is or your plant is in fruit and it wants to know what the flower color is this kind of key basically lets you enter in whatever information you have on the plant in your hand and each time you enter in information it subsets the possibilities so in virginia 3164 species if you enter in that it's a broadleaved woody plant you're down to 474 already almost anybody can do that right you don't have to have a lot of sophisticated terminology or knowledge to do it and then if you keep on entering things like the leaves are opposite they're simple they're palmately veined lobed and toothed you're down to 10 species and then you click show and it shows you maples and viburnums and you can make a choice based on the possibilities I mean maybe if you enter in enough information you'll get down to one species it depends but you may end up with a number that you have to consider and once you've selected what you think might be right you can look at photographs you can look at description and habitat you can look at range map you can see the breadcrumbs of how you got there what what choices you made that got you to that point so a great app so we also decided to do a wildflower guide we did this with timber press eye and colleagues at the garden it covers this area so not Kentucky but it'll work well in eastern Kentucky so it covers eight states and it also has this kind of simplified approach to kind of keying the plant rather than just in Peterson's wildflower guide you know if you had a plant with yellow flowers there were like 131 pages of yellow flowers that you had to flip through right so this gets you down to just a few pages by entering in basic information on flower color flower symmetry number of petals and some simple leaf type questions but then you get to a page like this that that where you can sort through and compare the photos so the big flora the flora of the southeastern United States so back in October we dropped 29 floras onto our website they're freely downloadable there's the full flora there's five regional floras and there are also individual state floras for all of the states so this is the area covered and Tara asked me to explain what part of Kentucky is in the southeast and in my opinion all of Kentucky is in the southeast so there's a pretty major floristic boundary that is essentially at the glacial boundary so north of the glacial boundary you have all this country that was flattened by the by glaciation the drainage was deranged it has bogs and so forth and so on and in the unglaciated interior low plateau and southern Appalachians and so forth you basically have this these relictual residues of species that were that were not ridden over by ice so so this is how I define the southeast so these are the little maps that are included that contain a lot of information about the distribution and also the distribution outside of the area these arrows show you where the plant occurs outside of the map or Ian means that it's endemic to the area on the map um so 10 000 species here's the download site 1848 pages we've had over 3 000 downloads since late october there are the five physiographic regions sub region floras and the 22 state floors so if you're going to work in Kentucky you can download the Kentucky flora and it will work pretty well it's not super customized these are where the downloads have come from Kentucky is doing nicely I like that little yellow dot in Kentucky and the flora contains scientific and common names detailed habitat description phenology distribution the little map comments detailed synonymy and hyperlinks to the nature serve global ranks the rarity ranks and to show you sort of how the keys work so when we produce all these different floras basically the keys get automatically simplified so here's the key to magnolia for Kentucky and the key to magnolia for Louisiana and you can tell by the key numbers here that something is missing um so each well Louisiana has five magnolias and Kentucky has six not too much overlap between which ones are present in each state but you end up with a functional key that excludes all the species that aren't in the state so the basically the computer automatically does that the programming so we're currently working on derivative floras um that uh will involve sort of not just sub-setting but then adding back additional information so we're working on a a flora of Arkansas with Theo Whitzel and colleagues at the Arkansas nature preserves commission we're working on a flora of Delaware funded by the mount cuba center um with bill McAvoy at the Delaware natural heritage program we're working on a flora of georgia with max medley and the georgia natural heritage program funded by them we're also working on a couple of floras and flora yulets with the national park service cumberland piedmont network a little river canyon flora and a guide to the ferns and leica fights of the cumberland piedmont network so that would include mammoth cave and so forth and this will be with illustrations this is a sort of a more public facing um flora so um i want to announce though that uh just uh about a month ago i got generous funding from a conservation philanthropist that will support basically taking this whole project to the next level and we'll be reworking all the keys um and optimizing them um making them easier to use for a broad range of users um we'll be compiling five to ten photos for every species in the flora including diagnostic feature photos we'll be adding in a additional field into the flora on field recognition advice for families genera and species how do you tell a holly from a rose shrub and expanding the kind of idiosyncratic comments about history and edibility and field survey hints that i think makes it less dry of a flora and more approachable to a broad set of amateur users um we'll develop the graphic keys and to do that we'll have to develop a database that will enable the computer to do that kind of sorting um and the plan is that we'll release five probably five sub regional apps that'll be similar to the current flora virginia app but with some additional features even to it and that will cover kentucky and the entire southeast um so um those will be on ios and um and android um one of the limitations of the floor quest app has been that it's um on um on apple devices only um and we're going to be putting in additional things like c of c values improved g ranks um and doing this with an expanded regional set of contributing experts it's really going to i think be a pretty amazing resource for for botanists and conservationists in the region so tara called out that i was going to say something about facebook so i threw this in so here's a few favorite facebook sites for plants uh obviously for you all the kentucky native plant society um i have a facebook page or group weekly's flora of the southeastern united states that i use for posting updates about the flora new species that get described um kind of fun um plants that i see and so forth um the southeastern grasslands initiative has a couple of different facebook groups but one that's more plant focused is the ecology history and biodiversity page and then two um sort of regional pages that were created by edwin bridges are the southern apple action flora and ecosystematics and flora to flora and ecosystematics it's really more than florida it's really a coastal plain southeastern coastal plain but these two each um well 1.9 000 almost 2 000 members of southern apple action uh 5400 members um here they a lot of really great information gets posted on these um sites about that you can learn a tremendous amount from by just going to the site occasionally and and going through things and then i was in i was inspired by tony romano's presentation this morning to just briefly mention also um we've had kind of effort as well in north carolina about finding piedmont roadside native plant uh sites um and this is a an i naturalist page that was set up by uh julie tuttle with 10 000 observations now and 164 people contributing to it um of these um these relictual roadside biodiversity gem sites that are supporting a lot of the sun loving fire historically fire maintained but now mowing maintained um plants in our in our southeastern region um and all so i want to close uh with uh kind of uh what i hope are inspirational remarks sometimes it's easy to get discouraged in the conservation business but uh these are fish and wildlife service and north carolina wildlife resource resource commission biologists searching for bog turtles on a very very cold uh december day um and the dedication is uh just amazing um but we need to train um the new generation of um magi botanists and magi ecologists and magi zoologists um to go out there and conserve the really magical flora and fauna of our region our southeastern region and uh a north carolina centric photo here but heritage and state agency federal agency this is gary kaufman who works for the forest service what i call a combat biologist position um people who work in agencies uh that are of multi purposes some of which are not conservation oriented um justin robinson a contractor for natural heritage we've been remiss in broadening the scope of our human diversity uh supporting biological diversity um in the past and uh and need to work on that and um just to the final closing is kind of a couple of word pairs um and uh and all economy and ecology they both come from the same root oikos the greek oikos meaning home and um um there's often been a tendency to view economy and ecology as um as in opposition to one another and i think what we need to work towards is a realization that economy and ecology have to work together um in the long range and sustainability and so forth we're never going to have a good economy if we um if we destroy the house the oikos that we live in um and all uh they have to work together conservation and conservative that's also kind of a word pair that um has come to sort of be viewed as in opposition to one another um and um it's important for us i think to remember that a lot of great conservation innovations legislation in the past um came from republican administrations uh teddy roosevelt um a lot of great conservation legislation was passed under uh richard nixon um and all and we need to reunify that conservation is conservative uh they mean the same thing really um and i guess i want to highlight the you know the the legacy of land um that uh many of us who who grew up and live in the southeast we appreciate the land for what it is we have connections to the land uh the the younger generation less so um my parents grew up on farms um i grew up in the woods all the time i spent about a month out of every year with no electricity um at at our camp up in the mountains um you know without electricity without screens it's almost impossible for most of us to imagine nowadays um but um that connection to our natural heritage and the legacy of land is something that um you know i think it is a greater challenge than ever to to convey to a broader set of people and in the long run you know our i think our conservation agenda will only succeed if we do uh if we do broaden the set of supporters and participants through citizen science through um through politics through um understanding the the science and having access to tools for identifying and learning about uh what's around us um so i guess that's my um my sort of hope for the future so curing plant blindness or plant attention deficiency uh building uh botanical capacity i've always loved this quote from baba de um from the 1960s in the end we will conserve only what we love we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught so i'll close with that thank you alan that was awesome um there's been lots of comments and a few questions um but in i guess let's see we'll take just a few we're kind of running a tiny bit over um but i'll ask a few to you alan and then the rest maybe during um uh the next talk uh you can uh reply to some of these yeah and i can also i can also stay i don't know whether things are gonna close sharp at the closing time but i can stay on a little bit after okay great great um yeah there's just lots of kudos um let's see you addressed some of these already uh like the i the ios um in the flora quest you know in 2016 the year your flora quest app was the reason why i switched from android to iphone and it's just been a downward spiral ever since um let's see uh i'm going through um i there has been talk of um you know will there be call for photos how are you gonna incorporate some of the photos how can we help as a native plant society um you know for kentucky information um well that's a great question um the we really just got this funding um like a month ago and um i'm beginning to organize things about that um we we will definitely be putting out calls for photos um we've also found um on some other projects and fio out in arkansas has that i naturalist is a great source of sort of prospecting for photos and then contacting people and asking for permission you know where you can look for the sort of the right photo that shows the leaf arrangement or shows the aspect of the plant or the the plant and fruit or some diagnostic feature um but yeah we will we will be looking for we we've compiled about 50 000 photos of the flora of the southeast but we're going to be looking for another 50 or a hundred thousand uh probably uh to to add that i think we'll also be putting all this up on a website as well as in the app so it'll be sort of um once again sort of multi-purpose um so um i will uh be back in touch with uh the the Kentucky Native Plant Society folks and uh when we have more specific kind of uh requests and and uh have organized how we can receive things so awesome great