 Okay, so for those who don't know me, I am Tara Littlefield on the state botanist at the office of Kentucky nature reserves. I've been involved with Kentucky native plant society for many years and various capacities, and I also in the coordinator of the newly formed Kentucky plant conservation Alliance, which I'll talk about so I'm basically just going to give you some highlights on some of our plant conservation projects that we work on at the office of Kentucky nature reserves and then some of our partner projects that we're starting up through the Kentucky plant conservation Alliance group. So, for those of you who don't know the office of Kentucky nature reserves we're a state organization in the energy and environment cabinet. And we have a lot of various programs and all of our larger programs are tied to laws they're mandated by state law and statutes so the ones that I'm specifically going to kind of talk about are our rare plant projects which are tied to our the Kentucky rare plant act, which is, which is Kentucky state law, and then also our Kentucky natural heritage program so our biodiversity and heritage programs. So the nature reserves of the office of Kentucky nature reserves we are the natural areas program so we have various programs under under our natural areas program, but basically we have a lot on land protection and acquisition through our heritage land conservation fund program. We create state nature reserves. A lot of the state nature reserves are research only they have a lot of rare species and communities. We also have our natural areas, which are in a lot of partner projects and conservation easements with different state agencies and nonprofits through our acquisition programs. We manage the wild rivers program and so I'll talk a little bit about how some of our rare plant projects overlap with the rare with the, our wild rivers program. So we're also the natural heritage program and nor salam is going to talk a little bit later and she'll talk a lot more about our natural heritage database. Basically every state has a heritage program where we have biologists and folks sending us a biologist collecting data and folks sending us data on rare species and natural communities, and we house this information in an online database. So we'll talk about this in a later talk, but we have an online Kentucky biological assessment tool where you can go online and look at some of the information on these rare species. So I also in 2016. Working with the Office of Kentucky nature reserves and Kentucky Native Plant Society, we formed the Kentucky Plant Conservation Alliance, which is a public private partnership of various organizations working together to save rare plants and natural communities. So a lot of the initiatives of that group right now are greater networking between all of the different conservation organizations and agencies and conservation horticultural. And also serving as a link between all of these different organizations to work on different plant conservation initiatives and priorities. So you'll hear more about this group coming up where we're forming. We're working on our steering committee meetings, pulling in some new folks. And so, if you have, if you want to get more involved with this please reach out to me. And you can look on, we have a website that's a part of the Native Plant Society and we have a lot of information on this group and a lot of the different projects that we work on. So plant conservation in Kentucky. We're pretty biodiverse state, we're typically kind of, you know associated with the southeast but we have a lot of influence from the northeast in the Midwestern prairies and the. Multiple regions. And this map is a is a map of where our rare plants hotspots are across the state. And, you know, a lot of our projects that we work on focus around these hotspots and working on these individual species. So last year, every four years, as mandated by the Kentucky Rare Plant Act, we update our rare plant list. And so in 2022, we worked on that. And there was a lot of work that went into that so for four years of, you know, the the replant list is a, it's a work in progress we're always working on it we always gather new information. We have several botanists and ecologists now running around collecting information. Devin Rogers, who works at Kentucky Nature Preserves was also instrumental in helping pull all of this together, but we did a lot of work over the past four years to kind of beef up our rare plant database and rare plant assessments. So we updated a lot of the taxonomy I like to joke that we weeklyized our flora, and Alan's going to talk right after me so you'll, you'll get a little, a little feel for, for what I mean. And we've added a lot more information into our rare plant database, we updated a lot of the conservation ranks but the general trend still held where about 25% of our flora is of conservation concern so that's about one fourth. You can find the rare plant report and the list of species in our annual report and the links are on here as well you can also just Google Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves rare plant list and you can probably find it that way. Something else that we're working on a lot over the past year is we're partnering with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife to add plants and insects into this the state wildlife action plan. And this is a huge project and it's really, really important for plant conservation. Because it really will link plant conservation efforts with so many different organizations and, you know, integrating plants and insects into into the state wildlife action plan. Essentially what we did was you know we have a rare plant list and this what we've added into the state wildlife action plan is a subset of priority rare plants from our rare plant list that that we want to work on over the next decade. So we're finalizing that over the next six months there's going to be a lot of information and reports and some online databases that's that results from that. So more on that soon as a part of that as well. We are also working on natural community profiles that will be linked to all of our state wildlife action plan plant species. And so this is also something that's in progress that's going to be released this year. So more on that soon. So, let's see. Our office. We are the recovery leads the state cooperators with us fish and wildlife service for federally listed plants in Kentucky. So we work a lot with us fish and various partners on the recovery. And so we have a lot of work to do and there's a lot of plants that are globally rare that are not listed at risk plants in Kentucky we have nine federally listed plants currently over since I've worked at nature preserves over the past 1520 years we have successfully done a lot of work and partnerships and and management plans and and so that that's that's a huge success but we still have a lot of work to do and there's a lot of plants that are globally rare that are not listed and we also actively work on preventing the listing of those types of things by proactively working on on conservation efforts of those so a lot of status surveys monitoring management. And implementing conservation strategies for all of these species so I'm not going to go into all of them that would be way too much essentially every all of the the federally listed plants we have so much work going on with with all of them and and almost annual and annually we do work on on every every single species under that program. But this is one, you know, it's just, it's spring is just it doesn't look like it outside right now but spring is just a few months away. This is one of our, our spring flowering federally endangered plants called bronze rock crust that occurs here in the comfort where our offices are at and where I'm at this morning. It's a cute kind of, you know, appealing little mustard but maybe only a botanist can love this is its glamour shot. It took me only 15 years to get this glamour shot of bronze rock crust. You know that this this plan occurs in limestone, Mesophidic forests, we have a lot of state nature preserves with this plant. We do a lot of private lands monitoring and working to protect populations on private lands conservation easements, turning sites into state nature preserves and then of course with that comes a lot of monitoring and management on our own site so that's a good stuff. Happening with bronze rock crust glow bladder pod similar habitat, the Kentucky River Palisades. We do a lot of work with this. I know Bridget Williams, Dr Williams is going to be talking later on about Kentucky Gladecrest it's just one of our federally listed species. Missouri Botanical Garden also is working on a genetic project on on on on glow bladder pod there's just not not enough time in the day to talk about all this stuff. Kentucky Clover that's one we work on under this program it's not officially federally listed but it is the rarest plant that we have in Kentucky. Only two known populations we work a lot with various partners on this Missouri Botanical Garden is working on this one too for genetics. We work with Cincinnati zoo to propagate plants. So much stuff, white fringes orchid, this is a huge one. We entered into a partnership last year where with the, the Danube National Forest where we are going to restore and recover the remaining fringes orchid populations in Kentucky so this is a massive project a five year project that's involving a lot of our staff and a lot of partners. And so more on that I'm going to be giving a seminar specifically on this project in March at the University of Kentucky if anyone is interested in that so so much stuff involved with with this wild rivers, a lot of our rare plant work and natural community work overlaps with you know our natural heritage or our natural areas program and our wild river program. And a lot of our federally listed plants occur on these prairies of the river. And so we've done a lot of work in the Cumberland Plateau and the interior low plateau on on several of these federally listed plants. And I think that this is a video that may or may not work. I'm not sure. But this is, this is the Rock Castle River. It's a Cumberland River scour just amazing areas actually my screenshot or my background this is big south fork right there one of my favorite habitats. The Green River. This is a huge project that our office is working on. Not only rare species monitoring, but aquatic monitoring. It's a large dam project where they're removing the dams on the Green River and then some tributaries and our aquatic biologist Mike Compton and several of our plant folks have worked on this and looking at the effects of the removal of dam on on river scour species on the riparian areas and also on all the aquatic resources this is going to be a huge project where we're going to do some publications and and some outreach for this this year. So, another video this is me getting ferried on a boat on the Green River chasing an eagle. This place is amazing. There's some undescribed limestone river scour on this on this on this river that we're currently doing as well so really cool stuff we do a lot of rare plant monitoring on our natural areas in partnership with our natural areas managers. So for the past five, six, 10 years, I'm not sure how long it's been. We've set up over 200 long term monitoring plots on mostly our grassland sites on our state nature preserves and in the Danube National Forest so we're really wanting to increase our monitoring and our kind of, you know, collaborations with natural areas managers, the science based conservation of rare plants natural communities so. And this is just another example, you know, in addition to grasslands we're doing bog monitoring work in the mountains. We do a lot of seed collections in for our federally listed recovery program. We, of course do a lot of exit to conservation with partners. Just one example of some Cumberland Plateau species that we've collected. This is going to be on the stakeholder slide so you can get these links during the break. But we've written up a lot of the projects on the on the lady slipper in the in the native plant society newsletter so you can read about the projects and the different partners that were pulled into recovering a lot of and propagating a lot of these plants. We have a Orchid Restoration Program that we work on with Atlanta Botanical Garden and the North American Conservation Center so lots of really great stuff going on there. We do inventories on natural area on the National Forests. I'm going to slide through some of this stuff. As I'm coming to the end of my talk. Some of you all may have heard Tony Romano, who is a botanist nature reserves, he manages our statewide roadside habitat survey project, and this is year four so next year we will have completed an entire roadside survey of the entire state of Kentucky and that will be a huge feat so I know you guys have heard probably several talks from our office on this program it's a huge undertaking. Tony hasn't updated and he's working on the reports right now, but basically you know that far western part of the state was covered last year and now we just have kind of the eastern part in the north eastern part of the state to wrap up. So really great stuff coming from that. Kendall McDonald at our office manages our biodiversity assessment program. We do the ginseng monitoring for the state in partnership with Kentucky Department of Agriculture. And that's also one of five year cycle. And this is the last year of that five year project so you're going to be hearing a lot more about that as well. This is white haired golden rod this was one of the delisted species from our federal program, and we're still trying to figure out how to continue to monitor this. We started this adoptive rock house program. And we're working with partners right now to kind of revamp the program and see where we can take that so more on that Jeff talked about our Kentucky botanist figure we do a lot of different projects and really as a tool for a natural heritage program, we get so many rare plant records updates, new records just random stuff. There was a close call to some state records as well so using a naturalist as a tool to build our botanical community as well as like find these really interesting records from folks that you would have never known about. It's just an amazing resource that I've been really, really shocked about, and we'll continue to increase our efforts with with I naturalist. And then I'll end with this. We're hiring our team of botanist and ecologists there's seven of us now at Nature Preserve run around the state, looking for for interesting plants and doing all of this great conservation work we are going to hire a botany technician this this year so if you're interested in joining our team reach out to me I think this will also be in the stakeholder real if you are interested, but that is the end of my talk if anyone has any questions, let me stop.