 Yeah, so we're excited to have Chris Benda aka the Illinois botanizer to present for us. So Chris is the is a botanist and past president of the Illinois native plant society. He's currently a researcher at the Southern Illinois University where he coordinates the plants of concern Southern Illinois program and teaches the flora of Southern Illinois. So besides working at SIU, he conducts botanical fieldwork around the world. I know he's been to Hawaii, many, a couple of times now very jealous of that teaches a variety of classes at the Morden Arboretum and leads nature tours at camp. How do I say this on the song. Okay, thanks. He has research appointments with the University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratory and is an accomplished photographer and author of several publications about natural areas in Illinois. He has an awesome website. www.illinoisbotanizer.com and I particularly really like your like natural community game that you have on your website. It's pretty awesome where you can connect like different management practices and species to natural communities. It's super cool. Anyways, I'm really excited that Chris is is is going to present to us and I think we could learn a lot from the program that he manages. So I'll let you take it from here Chris. Okay, thank you very much for the introduction I'm actually headed to Hawaii for my sixth trip on Sunday. So, lucky me. But I'm here today to talk about the plants of concern program here in Illinois. So this is a community science rare plant monitoring program. And this is actually the fourth time that I've given a talk on this topic. And on some of the other times I had a little little more time and so I started that I showed the video that's at our website plants of concern.org. It's about six minutes long so I encourage people who are interested to go to plants of concern.org and and watch the very well produced video that explains a little more about the program as well. I have a lot to talk about so I'm going to go pretty fast here. But again my name is Chris Benda work in Southern Illinois. The plants of concern program is a partnership between Chicago Botanic Garden and Southern Illinois University. And about other things that I do there. So as I'm sure most people are aware, Illinois has seen a lot of habitat destruction alteration etc like most of the country. It's estimated that there were 22 million acres of prairie in the prairie state, and about 2200 acres is considered to be in a pristine or nearly pristine natural condition. So one 100% not very much. So, Illinois has seen drastic landscape changes and of course that has implication for our native plants. I think it's good to acknowledge that there have been many people who peoples who have you know, been in North America, and ones that precluded Europeans were loose confederation of tribes here, many different ones here in Southern Illinois. To acknowledge that we do have a lot of public land in Southern Illinois, and this map shows a little bit about that so we have the Shawnee National Forest is about 290,000 acres that's in the brown. We have two national wildlife refuges crab orchard there is to the north and blue, and then the scattered blue to the south is the Cypress Creek. And then the wildlife refuge and then of course we have several large state owned properties like the cash river state natural area. And so collectively there's lots of places to view plants and, you know, honestly for plants to live in the environment so that's, that's one thing that is really enjoyable, I think about living in Southern Illinois. And if you watch the video they will quote this paper that said one third of all plants may be at risk of extinction. It's kind of a big reason for doing plant monitoring and plants concern program. Some of these are fairly obvious but of course there's many threats to native plants, sort of, first of all is plants need places to live. And we look at the landscape around Chicago there's not a lot of places for plants to live in this kind of environment but perhaps you're a tree. So that's sort of obvious thing. We look at fragmentation effects as well. In Jackson County, which is where Carbondale is Southern Illinois University in my home county. We see a fair amount of, you know, dark green, which is our forested blocks so fragmentation in Jackson County is not too terrible. You go up to Champaign County where the University of Illinois is and Central Illinois you can see all these squares, all the sections are very, you know, lots of roads are all farmed and you see the big city there in the middle so there's immense fragmentation happening in Champaign County and of course you go up to Cook County is the whole another ball game there with the urban sprawl and very little places for contiguous land to harbor native plants. So we still have, of course, it makes it species concerns that were mentioned, you know, earlier bush honeysuckle is one that is pretty prevalent throughout Illinois and pretty much any place where there are trees is under story of bush honeysuckle Japanese still grass has really been taken off as well. I live in a country club where we collectively have 400 acres. And so I've seen just on our own property and explosion of still grass in the last, you know, several years even. So that's concerning. There's also climate change effects to take into consideration and what actually is kind of interesting in regard to this with southern Illinois is that our rare plants may benefit from climate change you know that's anticipated the climate is going to warm. And so in southern Illinois we're at the northern extent of a lot of southern species. So as the climate warms those species may be moving farther north and becoming more common in southern Illinois. So that may be beneficial in that regard but of course in the northern part of the state where we have the program occurring as well. Plants are also going to be moving farther north. So that may not be as good for the rare plants in that region. So plants of concern was started 20 years ago actually had our 20 year anniversary. It was it's been run out of the Chicago Botanic Garden in northeast Illinois for those 20 years and just this last year with a large anonymous donation they were able to do a number of things including expand the program to southern Illinois. So I was hired in January to implement the program so we're almost a year into things and what's really. I want to highlight about this is a good example that kind of you know justifies or explains the program is in Cook County. The Cook County Forest Reserve District has over 500 rare plant subpopulations. So if they wanted to annually monitor all of these with their four biologists, it would be impossible. So the idea is to, you know, get the help of community scientists volunteers that will be trained and will annually go out on their own to monitor rare plant populations. This is one of the, the gist of things and I spoke to the Cincinnati wildflower society recently and now Kentucky native plant society and spoken of course to the Illinois native plant society. So this is something that would be interesting to see either, you know, created in other states or perhaps even a larger sort of Midwest plants of concern type of program so it seems like there's lots that to expansion that can happen here. So we monitor rare and listed species listed either as federally threatened or endangered or state threatened or endangered but one of the things that I really enjoyed about the program is. I was given a lot of flexibility when I was hired to design things so I was able to choose what counties to include and I included all the unglaciate any county in southern Illinois that has unglaciated terrain that's 14 counties. And then I developed the list of plants to monitor. So, as I said, we have federally threatened or an endangered in fact in Southern Illinois we only have one federally listed plant species that's Meads milkweed and it occurs at a couple sites it's very rare. But we have a number of Illinois threatening endangered species. I think there's 374 species statewide. So any of those that occur in the southern part of the state are included like the early sacks of fragile my crantees for geniensis. And then some things that are of regional interest, or perhaps are rare and just aren't listed for whatever reason like Leatherwood. And of course we are providing this data for conservation, the natural heritage department natural heritage division at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources they maintain the database of rare plants so that's kind of the central location for all of this information and that's where our data will eventually make it. So that's excellent and sort of a quick little thing about why we do annual monitoring this is the shoreline of Lake Michigan up in Lake County, and Lake Michigan has been experiencing higher than normal lake levels for many years which is causing a lot of erosion. There's actually several dynamics go at play here, but you can see from 2012 on the left to 2018 on the right that we're losing shoreline and those polygons are where rare plant populations once occurred, things that grow on the beach. We don't have a lot of beach in Illinois so a lot of those species are rare and you can see that they're underwater and they're not going to thrive very well there so with annual monitoring. We can keep an eye on the situation and in some cases propagate plants and put them elsewhere you know it's very drastic approach but in some cases that has been done and is needed. So I mentioned we had a there was an anonymous gift that allowed this new Community Science initiative, including expanding the program to southern Illinois this is a two year term position with the hope and expectation. I think that we will find a new funding source to continue it indefinitely, but also this donation was used to make the video which I mentioned is on our website, and to produce a mobile app and online training and update to the website. So the training we used to do in person, which has a lot of value as you can imagine, but it's also limiting and so we moved the training online which obviously was very beneficial for the pandemic period. So people can go on to the website and do the training and get, you know, trained up that way. Now the mobile app is what I'm really excited about. I was a little hesitant. I kind of like paper forms I always have and I would print off these paper forms and fill them out and when I finally embraced the mobile app I thought this is amazing I don't know why I've ever used a paper form in my life. But honestly, this is an app that you download and you go, you can, you can do all the data entry in the field, including your GPS points and do it all on your phone. So it's really amazing and it's something that we've talked about if there are other states that want to have a similar program that they could use the app as well in fact we've even talked about having a biologist at the state level, use the app when you go out and find rare plant populations. So you have to generate the assignment ahead of time, and you have to have a cellular connection to get that assignment to access it on your phone. But once you've done that when you're in the field, even if you don't have a cellular connection, you can do all the data entry, you just can't submit it, you can wait and submit it once you get cellular wifi which you know in Southern Illinois is an issue we don't have strong cell service throughout the region. So I really like the mobile app it's so amazing to get home at the end of a long day and know that the data entry is all taken care of already. And then of course I mentioned we updated the website, and that's really slick as well. So plans of concern, you know we'd love to have it statewide, but that's not possible yet so as I mentioned it's been in Northeast Illinois for 20 years, and then expanded to Southern Illinois starting this last January, and 14 counties there delineated as you know Southern Illinois. So when we go to a rare plant population of course we have the extent where are the plants located us and again we use that GPS on our phone. You count the plants get an idea of how many what percentage of reproductive record the associates species, and any impact impacts like invasives or any management that's known to be done directions on getting to the site etc. What I actually been doing is tracking my path on my phone and then I can upload that to GIS and I can make a map for that can be used on the events app. So if somebody was to go back to the site in another year they can download the PDF map that I created see the tracks that I put on there and just literally follow my footsteps to go to these sites and really access them, you know easily because in Southern Illinois, some of the sites are large or they're far from where you can park and so navigation is really an issue where you know in Cook County, you can pretty much drive right up to whatever you want to look at and have a short walk and be there so. Those are things we're doing there. So quickly here I want to mention some of the highlights of this year so I'm going to just fly through some of the habitat types and rare plants we have in Southern Illinois like limestone glades. We have really small forested openings that of course are becoming encroached with red cedar and you know natural succession. We have meats milkweed. We have material oblique was rare the climbing milkweed, loose age Salvia, Azaria, and my favorite hex electrospecata sandstone cliffs are also common in Southern Illinois, where we have things like high low Telfium telephioides, which is this formerly There are cliff club mods there, Hapuzia, Perophila. Ooh, the filmy fern is one of my favorites, Vanden Boschia Boschianum, and the femuranthus parvo floris, the small flower, fame flower, those all on sandstone. And then of course the wonderful French's shooting star, Primula Frenchii, once thought to be endemic to Southern Illinois but it can be found in several other adjacent states including Alabama. But beautiful one we have the mother load I like to say of the French's shooting star. We have these acid gravel seeps in, you know, extreme Southern Illinois, Pope County and Massac. And we get things like Carrick's Atlantica. The star sedge, we have Plotanthura clavalata, an orchid, and Rexia mariana the meadow beauty. The streams are interesting. We don't have a lot of plants that really grow in the stream but we do have this neat one the Plantago Cordata heartleaf plantain there's maybe 10 locations for that in Southern Illinois it does occur actually in other parts of the state as well. And then the really rare green Trillium I'll tell you about in a second flood plain forest swamps hydraulic Uniflora is rare just four locations I found for that this year. I'll tell you that in a minute and then of course this one here oxalis Illinois answers discovered and described in Illinois by John Schwagman, our former state botanist. Really lovely little sorrel. And then we also have the silver bells hallesia tetraptera, Styrox Americana, Clematis crispa number that this year and Amorfa 910s. We have a couple in forests, some other interesting things but I really want the little bit amount of time I have left want to talk to you about some finds this year so northeast Illinois in 20 years they've got a lot of volunteers involved. A lot of species monitor a lot of sites visited in Southern Illinois just this year we've had 38 volunteers we taken into the field we've monitored 92 species. We've had 68 sites for total 304 EO so one species monitored at one site that is one EO so 304 from this this field season is a number I'm very proud of. So some of the neat things that we found here in the remaining five minutes. And then we also found out that the EO is a rare spleen wart fern. I'd never seen this before it seemed like it was near extirpation in Illinois, very little was known about it or seen in the last 20 years and we went to one site and found hundreds of them, which motivated us to find all five known locations for this plant. Confirm its extant in all of them. So that was really exciting we did that in February when this is really conspicuous and of course the temperatures are nice. And so that was very motivating to do that. I've never seen any other geniuses I'd never seen early saxophage before. And it's only in Hardin County in Illinois and not only only Hardin County but only along the Ohio and Sanstone ravines of Hardin County, very localized but within those habitats. Super common I counted probably 50,000 I mean estimated 50,000 flowering plants I mean all the sandstone exposure had just loads of this. So it really is one that's made me think about what is a rare plan if there's 50,000 flowering stems but only in a small localized area of the whole state is that really endangered or rare. I'm not sure. And so it's been interesting to think about those things. The Agro Marginata was one that was only known at three sites that I visited all three back in 2013. And this is one that I learned well when I worked in Missouri. The periginia are shorter than the leaves. So that excludes a lot of other carex but they flower in April and the periginia fall off very quickly. And so it's one that you can only identify for about a month of the summer. I think that may be why it is so there aren't many occurrences listed so this summer I found 10 potential new locations now I didn't have any periginia so I couldn't be sure I'm going to revisit them in April but I have a search image for this. I am confident and I'm pretty sure we found a good number of new locations for carex agro marginata. The fighting was trillium verity this only occurs in Illinois and Missouri and Missouri is actually doing quite well or well enough in Illinois it's very rare. There were only two extant populations that I was aware of in southern Illinois. One of them was on private land along a drainage and I went there and there was no I think we count about 100 or so. And a friend told me he had worked on a property downstream from there 20 years ago and he thought he saw a plant along the creek where the driveway goes by so I got the whole landowner, and we went there and we counted 300 plants. So that was not known in the database as a location and then I went on started looking on the map and I found a tributary that ran into the same drainage system and I thought well I wonder if it's perhaps on this this tributary and it happened to be public land. So I visited with the volunteer and we counted again several hundred more. So we not only doubled the number of extant populations but we had maybe 110 plants known and now it's more like 500 so this I would still say is very rare deserves to be endangered but it was exciting to find several new locations for it. It is a beautiful trillion. The San Andra Hespidula is really exciting to this was only currently known in Jackson County, Illinois and they're about maybe eight locations for it, and some volunteers work with do a lot of long distance trail running and they cover a lot of territory and so I have them look out for one of them sent me a picture of the San Andra from Union County Illinois where it has not been documented. So I went there and found this scene about 800 blooming San Andra and I thought how did this get overlooked but it was a really remote part deep down in a ravine and so that was really exciting to get a county record for a rare country especially one that's only currently occurring in one county. Now we can say it's to, although I will say that it's, you know, the county adjacent to Jackson and the northern part of the county so it's not to you know county lines are totally arbitrary it's not too too far from the other populations but still exciting. Trifolium reflexum is another rare one just three locations is doing well where fire is on the landscape. In the Philippines I went to all those locations just five. So that's a truly a rare plant. Plexilectus spikata was one. My strategy was to go to all the known locations for any given plant so we can really get a snapshot in time of the full story of a species so we went to eight sites 15 sub populations in five counties and founded at each one. So 487 plants of that beautiful orchid. Alright I know I'm running out of time let me speed up here. Heteranthoraniformis went to all five locations, it was not at any of them and would have been determined, extirpated but I found four new locations and three of them were rotted out ATV, you know, abuse, and that's mud plantain this plant like shallow mud water and it's being created by this local ATV use where this had showed up so that was really kind of cool. And I guess I'll stop here but platanthoroflava also another one we found thousands and thousands of blooming plants, but only in three counties and I thought is this really rare. I don't know orchids are picky. I'm going to wait and see what happens. Next year. And see too much to share with you I'll end with the Keria Aquatica. I'd never seen this tree before such a beautiful one water hickory it's called. And we found 80 mature trees, there seemed to be no recruitment going on but we updated those that currencies for that. And I'll have to end here mention the show the names here of the staff of the Chicago Botanic Garden who involved, and then here staff at Southern Illinois University. So again that was very quick but I hope you learned a lot about the program and are inspired to help us out with monitoring for rare plants.