 Welcome everyone to the closing meeting of Wildflower Week. I think it's been a really successful event. I'm really excited with how it turned out. We had 16 different virtual hikes, field trips, available to everybody. And so thank you to all of our partners who submitted videos. Many of the videos had over 50 views, so people were definitely out there watching them. And perhaps some of you were able to go out and follow in some of their footsteps to see some of the places and flowers that were highlighted in the videos. One of the big events for the week was a botanical drawing class hosted by a former K&PS board member Amy Tipton. There were 23 participants, and I personally really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about drawing with using pencil. I drew a flocks myself. And then another event was a Wildflower trivia night hosted by the Arboretum and ours truly Emily Ellingson. And there were 37 participants for a really fun night of tricksy botanical questions. And my, my favorite team name of the night was the Smarty Plants. And then I just wanted to thank all of the partners. So everyone who contributed to the event. These are all different organizations who either submitted a video or did one of the events or like Shaker Village submitted a scavenger hunt, things like that. And then a very special thank you to Jeff Nelson, who was great. We put the website together as well as did all of the daily updates. Kendall McDonald, who is a botanist and Lycanologist with Kentucky Nature preserves, who put together eight of the videos that were posted for the week. All of the ones that had the, the K&PS intro were the ones that Kendall put together. And then Vanessa, who is our INAT guru, and if you look down on this list, she has gone through over 900 plants and identified them for you all. So thank you so much, Vanessa. And then last but not least, all of our members for participating in this week's event. So our centerpiece for the week was the statewide botany blitz. And just in case you don't know yet, the botany blitz is a community science event focused on finding as many plant species as possible in a select area for a select period of time. And so the focus of our botany blitz was on spring ephemeral. And we had observations from 63 counties, which I think is amazing because it's over half of Kentucky's counties, we have 120 counties in the state. And they ranged all the way from Calisle County in the far west, all the way to Pike County in the Far East. So it was a really great distribution of the whole state. And in the project itself we had 166 people signed up to partake in it. About 15 minutes ago, there was 2875 observations, which is crazy. I was not expecting that I was thinking maybe somewhere around like several hundred. So this is really awesome. Over 450 species were found. And then, in terms of people identifying it we had over 125 people helping out to make sure all of these species got identified. So thank you for all those people. And currently, our leaders are penguin paladin for most observations and John Abrams for most species. So well done job. And then, in terms of most commonly observed species. So we had 58 observations of flocks di varicada, as well as dwarf larkspur, those were the two big winners for the week. And then viola sorority or sorority or common blue violet came in second or third or however you want to count that. And then may apple spring beauty ruin enemy selenine poppy, all of the rest of these you can see had a lot of observations. You can see two invasives made the list to spring. Common invasives but the rest are beautiful, non native ephemeral species. And then we are, we have decided to hold off on announcing the winners. And purely because the botany blitz is still going through the end of today. And there are a lot of observations that we still need to identify so we are going to hold off on announcing winners. And then we will make the announcement in the next edition of the lady slipper. And we will give out prizes for the top three people in the categories of most observations and most species. So this gives everybody more time to upload photos if you haven't yet. And because data is stored in each digital photo that you take anything you observe from this week. And you post later on will still become part of the project, as it's, it's stored within that digital image. So what would be really helpful is if you get on our naturalist and help us sort through all these observations and help ID them all, that would be really helpful. So, I'm going to hand it off to Vanessa, who's going to give us some highlights on some really cool species that were observed this week. Okay, well, this was such a cool week. So many observations. We were really impressed with how many people got out, joined the project and we're observing plants this week. So we just wanted to go over a few of the coolest photos or species that we saw coming through. So this week, okay and peas surveys were focused on bronze rock crust, which is a little mustard. That is globally rare and is mostly found within three counties in Kentucky Franklin on and Henry counties. We've been surveying for this plant this week and enjoying the beautiful weather and here we've got two photos by okay and peas owns just slayed and Tara little field from Jeff Nelson and Robert Dunlap in the Kraken County. We've got this gorgeous blooming Carolina Silverbell it's got these beautiful pendulous white flowers. Jeff and Robert are like our power observers in Western Kentucky so they always like to see what they've got in their sights. In Warren County, a French is shooting star from Kentucky Courtney. This is a really cool shooting star similar to the usual species that we see in Kentucky, go to Kathy on media. So this is great to see in Warren County. So, like, all the photos of these mass blooms were so awesome to see blue I'd marry may still be at peak bloom at Raven run nature sanctuary south of Lexington so if you're in the area you should definitely go check this out because these are just gorgeous. I saw this beautiful rainbow saw this gorgeous roadside grassland remnants. Huge amount of birdsfoot violet this is just so cool to see. Again from just slayed, and this mass bloom of Virginia blue bells in Franklin County. This is still highest sense at Cherokee Park in Louisville so if you're in the Louisville area. This might be one to check out because they won't be there for long this is definitely a spring ephemeral so when it is done for the year in early summer it, it goes dormant and it disappears until next year. This is not a native plant but I this little bumblebee that was coming in for landing was just so cute and so I thought I'd put this in the slide. This is a great capture. This is wild ginger flower flowers at the base of the plant and so sometimes it's a little hard to see, but if you can. Usually you have to get down on your hands and knees or kind of crawl around to find them but if you can get down there, and you can check it out, these flowers are just incredible they're so hairy. This is a little bit unique in that it's a three parted flower in a die cut species, so that is a bit uncommon for plants usually die cuts are four or five parted and this is one of those rare cases where die cut is has a three parted flower. John Abrams took this awesome photo of two leaf miter word, this is one of the hardest flowers to photograph because the stem they're so slender, and these flowers are so tiny but they look like beautiful little snowflakes, and this is a great photograph from john. This is. Common blue violet and blue it's just a really pretty photograph there were so many of these beautiful, beautiful compositions. And then here's just a collage of a bunch of other gorgeous flowers that you guys photographed. There's so much more than this so if you have time, definitely take some time to scroll through, because it's, it's just so nice to see all this color after that long winter. Thank you Vanessa. And I'm going to hand it off to tear a little field now to close out the meeting. So I'm out here at Pine Creek Barrens I was running some errands and was doing a short pop in here. It's got really good cell phone service which is awesome. The Glade Crest the Kentucky Glade Crest which is a federally listed plant is going to seed so I wanted to see that and then some violets because I'm trying to catch as many violets as I can this spring. But like, like Vanessa and Heidi said this has been just such a great week. You know, there's that silver lining in the pandemic where you know we can connect more and communicate more with members across the whole entire state, virtually through INAT through these virtual hikes. And so I know, you know, a lot of people like to meet in person and we are certainly going to be planning some field trips I think later on in the year, possibly the board is going to be meeting in the next week to decide on exactly what our plans are. But I think that that these these meetings and particularly the botany blitzes with INAT we're going to continue to do those kinds of things into the future because they really just connect everyone across the whole entire state. Not everyone can can make it to one place, you know, for wildflower weekend so so I've been so so pleased and excited about the direction that we're going here so very exciting. Some other things I'll just touch touch base on briefly. With native plant society and different projects that we're working on this year and you know we've got our grants program. Our grants committee is looking through the grants right now but I think we've got one or two student grants that will probably be announcing in the next newsletter. And that that that grant. The student grant deadline has closed but if you do know any students that are still looking for grants. I'm sure we can can slide them in and review projects if you know anyone that that is is looking for grants. In addition to those student grants we also have native plant inventory grants that are open to anybody, the community scientists, not just students so they're small grants that will help you get to natural areas and catalog on iNAT or you know in species lists and and we've got folks that can that can that can help and guide guide you through that process so look so look on our website for for for those types of grant opportunities so that that's something new that we're doing just to try to connect. You know, everyone to different natural areas and and and and help with with species lists. So this fall we are definitely going to plan another Kentucky Botanical Symposium like we did last year and it will probably be online still. We might have some. I think that was kind of late winter anyway in winter so so that will probably end up still being on online and that and that works because then we can reach a much larger audience that way. But but if anyone on this call or, you know, just a call out to our members, reach out to us get involved. We need committee chair members we need more people to help organize field trips and and so many different things. We've got a lot of synergy going on with native plant society right now and, and I'm really excited there's new people joining. I think we could do a lot of great things in the in the next coming years. Just looking and looking at plant diversity conserving different areas, learning about all these different cool plants that we have across the state so that's that's really about it. We will be meeting in the next two or so weeks the board will to decide and get some dates down and just check we've got our monthly newsletter the lady slipper. You can hear a car background here. There's there's a road back there. But yeah check our newsletter that comes out monthly so you'll hear once the board decides if we're going to be organizing any actual in person field trips. You all be the first to know if you're on our email list and the members. So, that's, that's really it I'm just, I'm just really excited about all this. And I really appreciate everyone joining and looking forward to, to doing more and in botanizing more with everybody. So.