 The next speaker, Tony Romano, is a botanist in the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. He's originally from Illinois and spent several years working as a botanist in Colorado before coming to his position as a botanist with Kentucky Nature Preserves in 2019. He's going to be talking about an interesting project about using iNaturalist to monitor plant populations on the roadsides of Kentucky. So Tony, are you with us? Yes, I'm here. Well, take it away. Let me give my screen sharing. OK, can everybody see my screen? Yep. So yeah, hello. I'm Tony Romano with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. And today I'm going to be talking about remnant grasslands and pollinator habitat along Kentucky's roadsides. For a begin, I just want to say, unfortunately, some construction has started on the road outside my apartment, so I apologize if there's any noise in the background. Hopefully it won't be too distracting. OK, so roadsides are increasingly recognized for their importance for conservation. And within Kentucky, grasslands were once much more common and we're realizing that our roadside remnants provide some of our last remaining grassland habitats. And these roadside remnants act as refugia for our rare and conservative prairie species. Part of the reason for this is that they're maintained in an open state by mowing, so that helps prevent woody encroachment. And they're also generally protected from tilling or future developments. And just to kind of underscore how important they can be, one species in particular, royal catch fly, that's the red flower in the photo here. That species is only known from roadside populations in Kentucky. So these these habitats can be critically important. Roadsides are also increasingly recognized for their importance for pollinator habitat. And this can include at-risk species, which of course includes the bonnark, also the rusty patch bumblebee. And in Kentucky, we have the rattlesnake master borer moth, which uses aerogenium as its host plant. There's a growing body of evidence that roadside with native plants support higher insect diversity and abundance than adjacent, degraded roadsides that have less native species. And just to further kind of illustrate the importance of grassland habitats in Kentucky, we're going to look at sort of one version of a pre-settlement land cover map. And I want to draw your attention to the brown colored areas that were historically a mosaic of prairie wood or woodland habitats in what was known as the Big Barrens region. If we fast forward to a more recent land cover map, we see that that entire area has been converted almost completely to either cropland or pasture and shrublands. So this again highlights the importance of our roadside of remnant grasslands. So in recognition of all that, our agency has partnered with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, KYTC, to try and identify and evaluate remnant habitats, locate rare species and evaluate these sites for their pollinator resources. We've begun a five year statewide roadside survey project. And as you can see on this map, KYTC breaks the state up into 12 districts. So each year we're going to be surveying a subset of those districts. In year one, those are the blue counties. This was this past year's worth of field work where we looked at districts three, five and about half of district four. So if we take a closer look at that section, we can see that this is actually a really road dense part of Kentucky. It has approximately 7000 miles of road. And that includes some of our major metropolitan areas like Louisville, Bowling Green and Elizabeth Town. So one of the questions we had at the outset of this was, you know, how feasible is this? Can we can we really accomplish a 7000 mile road survey in a single growing season? And so to approach that task, we decided to focus in on hotspots of existing rare species. And so those are shown on this little map in the green dots. So those are known or rare species populations that we had some kind of record for that occurred within 50 meters of one of the roads in our survey area. And that helped us inform some of our survey priorities. We also included additional desktop analysis like aerial photography, topographic maps. We had a pretty good natural areas inventory data set for this part of the state. And then I did a ton of what I've been calling digital driving using Google Street View, which is really just what it sounds like. You know, you just step your way down the street using Street View imagery wherever it's available. And this can be really effective. And as an example of that, on the left hand image here, this was taken in, I believe, February. And you can see all of that green grass in February. So that kind of indicates this roadside is most likely converted to non-native cool season grasses. So that might be lower on our priority list. And the photo on the right is taken during the growing season. It looks like a little bit of a weedy site, but there's enough structural diversity that it might pique our interest a little more and be added higher to our priority list. And then once we were in the field doing surveys, we decided to adapt a rapid assessment method developed by the Monarch Joint Venture. This method utilizes Survey123, which is a web-based and mobile-based application. It's essentially a standardized survey form that can be completed in the field. And this enables us to standardize our observations across all the different people working on the project. And it also allows us to share this data with Monarch Joint Venture pretty easily. Because Monarch Joint Venture is mostly interested in pollinator habitat assessments, we also incorporated some additional grassland assessment criteria to make sure that we're meeting all of our project objectives. And then as Jeff mentioned, we also launched a citizen scientist project with iNaturalist. I'm going to return to that towards the end of this talk so you know how you can get involved. And so the outcomes of our data collection are a baseline of high-quality remnant communities in pollinator habitats. And that information is going to be used to inform management decisions to help KYTC better protect these important habitat sites. We've also planned some trainings for KYTC. Some of those got a little disrupted with COVID. So we're hoping to continue to plan those and move forward with trainings for their staff in the future. And so now I'll just talk through some of the results from our first year of surveys. And the good news is we did complete 7,000 miles of road surveys. This was a huge effort, but we showed it was possible. And so thanks to all of my co-workers who helped help me drive all these roads. Out of that, we evaluated over 90 locations. Those are shown on the maps in the little pink triangles. And out of those 90 locations, we identified 62 sites that had remnant grassland indicators. So we used a list of indicator species to help us identify sites for assessment. And we also looked at the overall composition of the site. So we were looking for a diversity of warm season grasses and abundance of native forests and things like that. And so out of those 62 sites, we identified 20 remnant grassland sites that we're considering to be good or better quality. And so that quality assessment is based on things like the size of the site, whether or not rare species are present, a threat assessment, looking at things like noxious weeds or erosion, and then the overall community composition. So from there, we're moving on to additional data analysis, reviewing each of these sites and prioritizing them for their conservation value. And then we're also continuing to evaluate the scoring system to make sure that it's functioning as intended. But I think the main takeaway here is that high quality roadside sites are really thin on the ground. There's really not that many of these. And so it again underscores the importance of identifying them and working to protect them. And just one point of clarification I forgot to add is that our project is focused on state maintained roads. So we're looking at the state highways. So we're not looking at the local and county roads at this point in time. But again, I'll talk about that when I introduce our iNaturalist project. So we have some rare species updates. Just overall throughout the course of the first year, we observed 529 plants on our roadsides. And we were able to update 37 existing roadside rare plant records. So these were, again, roadside records that we were aware of. We were able to revisit them and confirm that the plant was still there, that there were still extant populations. So that's great. And hopefully we can improve management of these sites so that they'll always be there. We also documented 16 new rare plant populations on our roadsides. I've just listed a handful of species there. But so that includes silphium penitifidone, baptizia aberrans, which is the wild blue indigo in the photo there with a nice bumblebee. And then sympiarchicum pretensine, the baron silky aster, that's a new population. That's the flower on the right. And that was in a really fantastic roadside remnant in Hart County. And so now I just have a little chart here. This was some interesting information that came out of this surveys. When we began this, we didn't really know what the typical size of these remnants was actually going to be. So the bar chart you're seeing there is just the range of those 62 remnant sites with their size and acres at the bottom. And then the number of sites on the y-axis. And as you can see, the majority of sites are smaller than a half acre. And the median size is just over a quarter of an acre. Our largest site was just under five acres. And it really shows that anything over an acre is actually pretty rare in our roadside system. And I should say these sizes are based on the maintenance right away. So that's the area that KYTC manages. In many cases, the habitat actually extended off of the right away into the adjacent property. So that's something we're considering as we work to protect these sites. It will require coordinating with landowners. And that's certainly something we're planning to try and do. But just wanted to clarify what these sizes actually refer to. And yeah, the remnants in the right away that abut larger complexes of native grassland and woodland habitat are definitely being considered of greater importance. So now I just have some pictures of typical roadsides that we saw throughout the year. This first picture here is probably the roadside we're most familiar with at this point after driving 7,000 miles. I'd say a roadside that's been completely converted to cool season pasture grasses with maybe some exotic forbs mixed in. We also saw a lot of roadside that resembled this. So it's a steep embankment, completely overgrown with noxious weeds, and not a lot of room for our native plant species. And then we saw a few heartbreakers like this. So this site had some old records of rare species on it. It had some interesting exposed bed rocks. So perhaps it had at one point in time been some sort of glade habitat. But when we viewed the site this year, it was completely overgrown with chickweed and other noxious weeds. So that's pretty disappointing. And so let's shift to some of our better sites. So these were some high quality road signs. The photo on the left there is from Highland Lick Prairie. This is an excellent quality remnant with a large population of Blue Wild Indigo. This is a site that's been known to Kentucky Botanist for some time. We were able to incorporate it into the project and work with KYTC to hopefully improve management of the right-of-way portion of the site. And this really serves as kind of a reference site for how good these road sites can really be. And then the photo on the right is a new prairie remnant we observed in Logan County. What you can't see in the photo, if you were to look at this area in an aerial photography, the whole area around it appeared to have been some sort of glade or barren site. When we reviewed the area this spring, just behind those trees in the photo had been completely graded for development. So that's really disappointing. But the roadside remains. And I think it does underscore that because of these right of ways, sometimes these remnants are actually better protected from development than other private lands without some sort of encumbrance on them. In this site, this Logan County site had two rare species, white prairie clover and cut loose prairie dog. We documented several glade remnants. So a glade is a rare habitat in Kentucky that's characterized by thin rocky soils that limit the growth of trees and shrubs. These sites typically support diverse native herbs and rare species. We visited a glade in Hardin County with KYTC staff. So this was a great opportunity to show them what a glade habitat looks like, show them how we're collecting data, what kind of sites we're looking for. And we hope to plan more of these onsite visits with staff in the future. And so I have just a couple more graphs here to talk about. So one of the things we were interested in when we started this project was whether or not grassland remnants would provide good or better pollinator habitat than non-reminent sites that may have native plants. You can kind of picture an old field or something like that that has a mixture of native and non-native species. So we were wondering how those would compare. So what we did was we took 25 random pollinator scores. So these were scores done through the modern joint venture data form. And we compared them to 25 remnant sites. And what you're seeing in this little box plot, the red is the non-reminent sites. The black area is the remnant sites. The pollinator score is on the y-axis. And the horizontal crossbar in the middle of each of those boxes represents the median of the type. So as you can see, for the remnant sites, the median is about 55. For the non-reminent sites, it's about 35. So there's a pretty large difference on the average pollinator score for these two habitat types. And one thing we realized with this is that the modern joint venture scorecard weights milkweed really heavily, which makes sense. They're interested in modern conservation, so they're going to include that as an important part of their scorecard. But we found that our high quality remnant grassland sites usually contain multiple species of milkweed. And so they scored very well in comparison to our non-reminent sites. Degraded sites with abundant common milkweed still scored low because they were often compromised by abundant noxious weeds. And then if we look at the same comparison from later in the growing season, we see that these two sites are separated even further. So milkweed develops a little later in the season. It becomes more conspicuous later in the growing season and easier for our observers to spot. So by excluding the early season observations from May, we see that the averages shift up in the remnant sites. And they also move up in the non-reminent sites. But we see that overall the two habitat types separate even further in terms of their habitat scores. So we're confident that remnants are providing high quality pollinator habitat. And an important takeaway here is that pollinator habitat assessments are sensitive to timing. And OK, so since I brought up milkweeds, we might as well look at some pretty milkweed pictures. So over the course of our year long survey, we observed nine species of milkweed along our road sides. We documented six new populations of purple milkweed, asclepius purporescens, which is watch listed by our agency. We're trying to get a better understanding of how rare this species really is. And then we were able to update some observations of tall green milkweed, asclepius hortella in the Kraken and Grayson counties. And I'll be talking about that again when I get to the inaturalist section. But I'm just going to click through some of these photos. These were all photos that I took while conducting these red side surveys. So this is asclepius varitiflora with a nice bumblebee coming in for a visit. We have our common milkweed, asclepius siriaca, asclepius verticillata. This is the very common asclepius tuberosa with a nice swallowtail visiting it. Here's our asclepius purporescens. And then asclepius incarnata. This was a really nice wet meadow, wetland habitat in Allen County, I believe. So I just have a few additional considerations these are things we're thinking about as this project continues. One question we kind of grapple with is, how small of a remnant is too small for effective conservation action? At the outset of this project, we didn't really understand what the size of these remnants was going to be. I think as I showed you in that graph earlier, we now have a much better understanding of what that is. And so I think we're able to address this question a little more effectively. Our smallest sites are about 100th of an acre. So really tiny. And those sites might be most appropriate for some seed collection and things like that. But even small sites can be important if they're connected with larger habitat blocks. So we're trying to look at the full mosaic of surrounding lands and things like that when we consider what sort of management and conservation action is appropriate. And then we've identified some potential management coordination issues. So if we're able to adjust mowing with KYTC, there's always the chance that the property owners will take something into their own hands. They might not like that the right-of-way is being mowed less frequently and mowed with themselves. So that would just be another coordination step with the landowner to address that. And then a lot of these sites have overlapping right-of-ways with different utilities. So we need to reach out to those entities to ensure that their management is in line with our goals for the site. And then as we move into different parts of the state for the surveys, we'll need to adjust our evaluation tools for the different habitat and eco regions we'll be looking at. Okay, so now I'd like to talk about our citizen scientist project. We're using iNaturalist. For those of you who haven't used iNaturalist, it's a web-based and mobile-based application that you can sign up for for free. You just need an email address. And once you sign up, you can upload photos and it'll include the location information. It'll suggest identifications. Other users in the community can help you identify things. And it's a great way, like Tara said, to kind of create a life list and also contribute to the Native Plant Society and also our agency. So to facilitate this, we started our own project. It's the Kentucky Roadside Native Plant Project. You can just search for that in the search bar on your web browser when you're on the site. And we're hoping and asking people to contribute photos of plants along roadsides throughout the state. So I mentioned that our site or our project is only focused on the state-maintained roads. And you're welcome to submit photos of state-maintained roads, so state highways. But if you have photos of plants on smaller local roads, like counties and local municipal roads, those are all welcome to you because that helps expand the net of observations for us. So please join this project. If you're looking for something to do this winter, go back through your photos and see if you can add them. These stats here I pulled just a week ago. So so far we only have 85 observations of 61 species and we have nine active participants. And one of those participants is me. So we wanna see that number go up. Again, please join this project. I'm gonna highlight some of the successes we've had with it on my next slide. So these were three rare species that we found in those inaturalist observations. So the first one here is tall green milkweed. This was submitted by Jeff Nelson. This was actually a population that we had a little bit of information on but in our database from the 1970s and we had no updates since then. So Jeff saw this, he put it on iNAT. I found it in the iNAT when I was reviewing it earlier this year. And I got in touch with Jeff, I met him on site and I've since alerted KYTC about this and we're also gonna be contacting the property owner to see that their management improves for this species. So that's really great. That's the sort of success we're hoping to have with this project. Then in the center there, there's the pale leather flower. That was an observation of a new population of this rare species from Frank Lynn. This was observed in Logan County. So thank you for adding that observation. That's fantastic. We didn't know it was there and now we do. And then the third one is an observation of Buckley's golden rod. So this was also Jeff Nelson and this is really great. We didn't know this population was there. It's a really rare species. So we're working with the landowner to improve management of that one as well. So you two can contribute to this and I hope you will. And with that, I think I'm just about out of time. So I just wanna say we're looking forward to another year of surveying roads and continued success of this project. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. Appreciate the presentation. We're pretty close to lunch break. So, but we did get a few questions. If you don't mind, let's go through those. From Emily Ellingson, are there any thoughts to expand these surveys to along railroad right of ways? That would be great. Our current project is specifically partnered with KYTC, which is why we're focused on the roads, but we know that others in the Southeast region are looking at other types of right of ways like power lines and things like that. And I would love to see us be able to tackle that in the future. Okay, cool. From Jonathan Kubisch, how many of these high quality sites, a butt pastures as opposed to other land uses, Erdia, are you know that? That's a really good question. I don't have a number off the top of it, but just anecdotally, a lot of the best sites were abutting what appeared to be kind of degraded barrens and woodland habitats with sort of cedar encroachment. In general, the pasture species tended to just move right into the roadside right away. At least that was what I was seeing this year. Cool. And from Alicia Huckabee. I'm sorry to interrupt. If we're gonna keep on our schedule, it's time for Heidi and Emily to speak.