 With that, I'd just like to turn everything over to Tara Littlefield. Tara is president of the Kentucky Native Plant Society, and she's going to take it from here. Tara, you're on. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff is our Native Plant Society board member and webmaster among many other things. We'll hear more about Jeff's work at the end of the botanical symposium. So welcome, everybody. Super excited to have everyone join this morning. It's a nice sunny morning at least here in central Kentucky. So the botanical symposium. So we've been organizing in this botanical symposium in the fall or winter. For many years now, we started in 2014. Of course, last year with the pandemic, we went virtual and it actually works out really well being virtual since there are a lot of talks. So, you know, pandemic aside, we might continue with at least a large portion of the symposium being virtual so we can record the talks easily. So, but the goal in general for the symposium is to bring together all of our botanical community professionals, community scientists, academics, researchers, gardeners, and students in order to learn about what's going on in the world of Kentucky Botany and beyond surrounding states in the region. Lots of good stuff is happening. There's a lot of benefit to just providing everyone updates of what types of different projects and organizations are working on, you know, different Native plant projects across the state. So, you know, our goal is just to collaborate more and communicate more. And we feel that this is a great way to do it. So, our first presentation that we're going to move into now is kind of, we're going to bombard you with some rapid updates from several staff from the Office of Kentucky Nature Visitors. So, I'm Tara Littlefield. I'm the president of the Native Plant Society, but I'm also a botanist and the plant conservation and natural heritage manager for the Office of Kentucky Nature Reserve. So, I work with a lot of really awesome botanists and colleges folks that are also working on a lot of great Native plant projects. So, we are going to just kind of give you some highlights of what we've been working on and also a few highlights of what Native Plant Society has planned in the coming months. So, I will share my screen and pass it off to Heidi Bronrider, who is the Native Plant Society Vice President and also a fellow botanist at the Office of Kentucky Nature Visitors. Okay. Hello everyone. I'm just going to talk about some of our upcoming events real quick. This coming spring, our annual Wildflower Weekend will be at Natural Bridge State Park. We are planning an in-person event with hikes and presentations and a Friday night social. The event will be $10 to participate and we will offer discounts for membership renewals at the event. And we're very excited to go back to in-person, so we hope you all join. In addition to the Wildflower Weekend, we are holding a statewide botany blitz for the week leading up to Wildflower Weekend. Last year, we held a botany blitz in lieu of an in-person event along with a bunch of virtual hikes that are still available on our website if you want to see them. The botany blitz was such a success and it definitely exceeded our expectations, so we wanted to continue with that in addition to our in-person event this year. So last year, there were 110 observers in the group. Over 3,000 observations were made in just a week span and 460 plant species were documented in Kentucky. So over 80% of those reached research grade, meaning the ID was confirmed by other inaturalist users. And you can see here on the slide some of the results of last year. Some people have fun with this as a competition, so perhaps this coming year, you can try your hand at that. We have a little tutorial on our YouTube page for how to get started if you've never used iNaturalist before, and it's very easy, so we help you join. And we're also planning field trips for this coming year, but that is still in the preliminary stages, so definitely stay tuned to our Lady Sliver blog to hear more about those in the coming year. So if you have any questions about our upcoming events, just put those in the chat for me and I'll be happy to answer. Hi, I'm Rachel Cook with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Today I'm going to talk to you guys about how I'll be updating the Kentucky Native Plant Suppliers List that's on our website. So what we have currently is what I compiled in January, February of 2020. And this was a survey that I had emailed out to a bunch of different suppliers and I gathered all the information, and this year it's going to look a little different. This year we are going to have a form on the website. So we're going to be looking for people's contact information, you know, public emails, phone numbers if somebody needs to call, what hours you're open, just to get a lot of clarity for people who are looking for to buy native plants. We want like a good description of your business and what your nursery is all about. And then we want to collect a lot of good information on are you wholesale, are you just like selling to the public, do you sell plugs or do you sell seeds? And then a big thing that we want to look into both as KNPS and as myself is at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves is where is this seed source coming from? Is it local to Kentucky? Is it coming from adjacent states? We really want to get a better idea of where the genetic material of these native plants that are being sold are coming from and get an idea of how that is being distributed throughout the state. And then this year we also really want to highlight what services are available. So do you provide landscape design? Are you a business that is looking to help landowners remove invasive species? Do you help landowners install native plant gardens? So we really want to highlight that. And then again this year we want to look at are invasives being sold at your business and really make sure that we know where these products are being sold. Obviously big box stores but we want to kind of help people who want to buy native plants know exactly who they're buying from and what other products are available. So this form is going to be housed on the KNPS website. Therefore if at any point throughout the year some information has changed or you just got your business started or something along those lines is going to be available year round and be updated more often rather than once a year. That way people can see what's up to date on our website. And then for the future I think Jeff aka Mr. Webmaster is going to be working to have a similar form so that we can also track native plant sales. Like if you're just someone growing a lot of native plants and you want to sell them because you have too many or do like a seed swap something like that. We're going to have a form available for that on the website hopefully soon so that we can have that for 2022 now that things are more in person. And then we've kind of talked about looking into a way to record how restorations are like have a way to track restorations in a state. Who's making restoration sites? Where are these restoration sites at? What's being planted? And that really helps us at the office of Kentucky Nature Preserves because sometimes we come across these great things that we think are remnants and we later find out that they are just really good restorations. And that's just something that we would like to keep track of. So that might be coming in the future once we kind of figure out the logistics of that. All right. So I'm just going to give a few highlights from the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. So first I'll update you all on the Kentucky Plant Conservation Alliance. So this is a kind of a group that the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves and Native Plant Society has created over the past five years were kind of a subset of both of those organizations. And we're a public-private partnership of state and federal agencies, land managers, researchers, botanical gardens, conservation horticulturalists, non-profits, private sector, volunteers committed to protecting native plants in natural communities of conservation concerns. So rare plants, rare communities with the goal of preventing plant extinctions. So currently our Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves staff coordinate most of these projects. And we started this because we recognize there was a need for a greater focus on rare plants. And we formed the Alliance in 2016. So this group also networks with the Greater Region, the Southeastern Plant Conservation Alliance. And as I said, a lot of the projects are coordinated by our botanists at the Nature Preserves. And what we do, we organize collaborative meetings like the Native Clover Conservation Meeting that was last year. We organize workdays, outreach, volunteer building, things like that. So a lot of those projects that we've started, you know, are single species projects working on rare plants. And also just kind of looking at ways that we can expand the conservation strategy of these rare plants into the conservation horticultural world. So I'll highlight a few of these. You can see here on the slide, the first one I'll highlight is Kentucky Clover. So Kentucky Clover is a globally endangered bluegrass woodland species. It's endemic to Kentucky. It's actually functionally extinct in the wild already, but we were able to collect seed. And what do you do if a rare plant is really rare and you want to try to increase populations or protect existing populations? So we do a lot of seed banking. We've partnered with the Cincinnati Zoo. Valerie Pence leads that group on propagating Kentucky Clover. Office of Kentucky Nature Preserve staff have been managing sites that are suitable habitat for the Kentucky Clover for introductions. And we've partnered with Kentucky Neoplan Society on organizing meetings to conserve the Kentucky Clover. So I'm happy to report that this is one of those rare plants that has come full circle in terms of collecting seed, managing habitat, working with conservation for the culturalists. And then just this past month, we transplanted close to 100 of Kentucky Clover plants back into the wild into high quality habitat. So those are ways that we're just using partnership and expanding outreach to protect and expand some of these rare plants. Another plant that I wanted to highlight that's also come full circle is the wood lily. So the wood lily, it's this really gorgeous plant right here in the corner on this slide. It's a state endangered pine bearing species that grows in the Cumberland Plateau. And these links, I forgot to mention, we do have articles that detail exactly the whole entire project on the Neoplan Society website. So go to the website to find out more details about exactly all the different work that's been done to conserve these species. But back to the wood lily. This species we started in 2016 trying to collect seed of it. So this is a rare plant that occurs on roadsides and power lines. And there was a lot of threats to this species in terms of mowing regimes and loss of habitat from the pine barrens community, lack of fire or bivery, things like that. So we were losing a large amount of our population. So we partnered with folks like Drop Seed Nursery, the Dangaboo National Forest, Kentucky Heartwood, collected seed. We had to set out cages on these wood lily plants in order to prevent the plants from being browsed by deer in order to collect seed. We worked with Margaret Shea at Drop Seed Nursery to propagate this plant. And she has been working for the past several years to perfect the technique of propagating this plant and has done a fantastic job. And I'm happy to say that this year, five years after we started this project, we were able to transplant over 500 wood lily bulbs into over five different natural areas within the Cumberland Plateau. A lot of that was on the Dangaboo National Forest. Some of it was on Nature-Beserved Property. And then there's a private land there as well. So super excited about that project and look at the article for more information. Another plant that I'll just highlight is the Mountain Lover, the Kissed McCamby Eye. This is a globally rare evergreen sub-shrub that grows on limestone outcrops in the cliff section of the Cumberland Plateau region. And this is one that we just started over the past two years expanding our work with this species. We've partnered with the Atlanta Botanical Garden to collect cuttings from the majority of our Kentucky populations. And they now have them in propagation there in Atlanta. And we've partnered with the Dangaboo National Forest and also Berea College Forest and Nature-Beserves. So eventually within the next year or two, we will get a lot of those plants back and transplant them back into high quality, suitable habitat. And then last I'll highlight the Four Rose Angled Genshin. So Rose Genshin. So this is a state endangered wet meadow species that occurs in the Eastern Highland Rim in Kentucky. This species was just discovered for the state just last year. And it was the first time that this species had been documented west of the Appalachian Mountains. So extremely disjunct from the coastal plain and Piedmont habitat of the Southeast where the main range of this plant occurs. This plant occurred on private land. And we're still working on protection efforts of this one population. But unfortunately, the landowner did not want to sell and really wanted that habitat for a different purpose. So we worked tirelessly over the past two years to collect seed of this plant. And we've partnered with Ironweed Nursery, Alisha Bocella, to propagate it and transplant it into protected wet meadow habitat. So that occurred this year. We're still monitoring the progress of those transplants. So that's another really great project that involves multiple partners. I mean, a lot of these rare plant and natural community conservation takes a lot of partnerships and a lot of effort to really make a difference to make sure that these plants and communities are protected in the long term. I wanted to just mention something that's a pretty exciting thing that's happening now for plant conservation in Kentucky. A lot of you might know of the state wildlife action plans. For every state has one, their multi-year strategies in which every U.S. state and territory assesses the health of its wildlife and lays out steps for conserving it over the long term. So these plans establish a framework for conservation efforts that aim to protect species before they are endangered, with each plan custom-fitted to its jurisdiction's unique needs and priorities. So traditionally, state wildlife action plans have just included animals. And the Fish and Wildlife Agency's lead these plans. And over the past 10 years, there's really been a lot of work from different plant conservationists to start including groups like plants in these state wildlife action plans. So I'm happy to report that Kentucky is one of those states. So currently right now, we're in the Southeast region. About half of the states currently have plants within their state wildlife action plans, as species of greatest conservation need. And we are actively now working with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife over the next year and a half to add plants to the swap. So that's really great. That will expand a lot of targeted plant conservation for a lot of our rare plants. So we're really excited about that. We're also, it's kind of an overlapping project, but every four years we update the Kentucky's Rare Plant List. And we are currently, Devin Rogers is helping out a lot with this project is assessing all of the plants in the state to make sure that we know what the conservation status is of all of our rare plants. So once we get that new updated Rare Plant List finished, then we will work on a subset of those rare plants in different priority actions in conservation and add those into the state wildlife action plan. So that's really exciting. And then I'll just end with just giving you all an update of our Rare Plant and Community Monitoring on our natural areas across the state. So over 65% of our rare plants are in disturbance dependent communities. So disturbance dependent, that's the open grassland communities, blades, barrens, wet meadows, bogs, seeps, communities that need fire or woody removal or other disturbances in order to maintain those habitats. So the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves is really trying to expand our science-based conservation strategies of these rare plants in natural communities and work in collaboration with natural areas managers on monitoring and looking at different ways to measure success of management prescriptions and to study the effects of practices on rare species and communities. So with this new effort in collaboration with natural area managers, we have over the past 10 years set up over 150 long-term monitoring plots across the state, and these are primarily all within our remnant grassland communities. These vegetation plots look at management effects over time, and they also help us classify these communities. We look at the floristic quality assessments of the plants that occur there. And then within these monitoring plots, we also have single species, rare species monitoring embedded within them. So just letting you guys know that there's a lot of science that goes into looking at how these species in these communities change over time and how our actions affect their conservation. So I'll pass it along to Tony. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm Tony Romano. I'm a botanist with Kentucky Nature Preserves, and I'm going to provide a quick update to our roadside grassland project that was started in 2020. So just as a very brief background, roadsides have increasingly gained recognition for their potential conservation value. They've been shown to provide important habitat for pollinating insects. Including some at-risk species like the monarch and the rusty patch bumblebee. And these roadsides can also provide really important refugia for rare and conservative grassland plant species. So in recognition of that, we've started a statewide roadside survey project. And Tara, if you want to go to the next slide. So this is a five-year project we initiated in 2020. It's in partnership with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. And so the goal of this project is to survey all of the state-maintained roads over the course of five years with the goal of identifying and evaluating remnant habitats, rare species, and also pollinator resources. So this map shows kind of our plan. As you can see, we're splitting it up so that each year we survey about 20 to 25 counties. In 2020, we surveyed the counties that are highlighted in blue. So that's primarily the Big Barrens region of the state. And then in 2021, we surveyed all the counties in that light pink color. So it's more southeast, including the Cumberland Plateau. And then next year, we'll be moving on to Western Kentucky. And just to show you what that looks like, a little in a little more detail. This is our progress map to date. So all of those blue-colored roads are ones that have been surveyed so far. It's about 13,000 miles of road. So it's a pretty significant effort. And then all of those little stars are sites where we've conducted a habitat evaluation. So that means there was something there that, you know, one of our botanists saw and decided to pull over and take a look. And so I'll just kind of go over our results quickly. As I said, we've completed 13,000 miles of road and we evaluated 200 sites. Out of those, we identified over 140 sites that had either a rare plant present or some other grassland indicator species. So some sort of, like a good example is the leatris in this photo. So something that indicates that maybe this used to be a remnant grassland or it's otherwise a sun-loving plant that requires kind of a more open condition to persist. And so we found 62 sites in 2020 that kind of met that criteria. And then this past year, we found 83 sites that met that criteria. But the quality of these sites does vary pretty dramatically. So some of them are high quality. Other than other ones are pretty badly degraded and sort of the desirable species are just barely hanging on. So they're not all created equally. Out of all of these sites, we've identified 30 grasslands that we would consider good or better quality. But I am still reviewing this year's data. So that number might actually go up as we finish our analysis for this past year. And we're ranking these sites based on size, presence of rare species, what the threats are, and the overall floristic composition. And one of the takeaways that we've continued to see over the past two years is that the highest quality sites are pretty rare. They're thin on the ground. So it really underscores the importance of this project to identify these sites and work with KYTC to modify management so that hopefully they continue to support these species. And just a brief update on our rare species observations from this project. This is just kind of a fun stat. But so far we have observed approximately 816 plant species. So that's not quite 30% of our flora, but I'm interested to see what that number will be at the end of the five-year project. I think it'll actually be close to the majority of our flora. And then in 2020, we documented 16 new rare plant populations. And we also updated 37 existing roadside records, essentially confirming that those species are still there and assessing the population. And then in 2021, we documented 25 new rare plant populations on the roadsides. And we were able to update over 40 existing records. So that's good progress. And I'm excited to see what comes in the next few years. And then just one quick little plug here before I finish. We do have a iNaturalist project set up for people who want to help make roadside observations. As I said earlier, our project is limited to the state-maintained roads. So that includes the intersates, the U.S. highways, and then the state highways. But we're not able to look at our smaller local roads and county roads and things like that. So that would be a great way for people to participate is to join the iNaturalist project and submit observations of native plants on those types of roads. Because we do review that information periodically. And we've had some really great finds on there that we weren't aware of. So please consider joining that project. And that's all I have. Sorry. I'm Vanessa Velker. I'm a botanist with OKNP. Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about some iNaturalist projects we've got going. Also our new Adopt a Rockhouse program. So our big year contest is a friendly competition or a personal challenge for people to find and identify as many species in a given year within a particular geographic area. This type of contest originated in the birding world. But over the past several years, it's really taken off in the plant nerd realm as well. So 2021 is Kentucky's third annual competition. You can see from a recent snapshot of the leaderboard that there are some clear leaders of the pack this year. However, there's still time to upload your plant observations from 2021. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that it's anybody's game right now in December, but 2022 is just around the corner. So we'd be really happy to see everybody join up if you're actively botanizing Kentucky. And our next project I want to highlight is the Kentucky Plants of Conservation Concern. This is a collector project that automatically pulls in all observations that are identified as endangered, threatened, or of special concern in Kentucky. With so many citizen scientist eyeballs covering so much ground, our iNaturalist observers are actually helping us at OKMP to keep tabs on occurrences of rare plant species in the state. And they're also discovering new unknown to us occurrences. So the number of our species observations on iNat that we've been able to pull has been steadily increasing over the last few years since we started monitoring this fight. So again, if you're an active botanizer, we'd love to have you join this group because we really value the citizen science observations. And the final thing I want to talk about is our new Adopter Rock House Volunteer Program. In 2022, we're excited to be rolling this out. This will help us continue to collect population data on the recently delisted species, white-haired goldenrod. This is a very rare goldenrod species. It's a Kentucky endemic. It occurs only in the Red River Gorge area of Menafee, Powell, and Wolfe counties. And within that small area, it only grows on the ledges and protected areas behind the drip line of sandstone rock houses. The species was declared federally threatened in 1988. And through diligence serving, monitoring, and protection efforts, white-haired goldenrod in the gorge made substantial recoveries. And the species was delisted in 2016. At that point, a five-year post-delisting monitoring plan was put into place to keep tabs on those populations. And that monitoring plan has reached its final year this year. However, even with that successful recovery, populations of white-haired goldenrod are still vulnerable to trampling or digging or invasive species. So to that end, we are seeking the assistance of citizen scientists to help us keep an eye on these populations that are still exposed to recreational impacts. And with our U.S. Forest Service Partners and Dan Dorsen, we're developing a mobile data collection survey and reference materials to train volunteers to continue the same monitoring protocols that we've been doing the last five years. So far, we've had a really great response from enthusiastic citizen scientists interested in the program, but we still have volunteer openings and rock houses that people can adopt. So if you are interested in hearing more about the program or you'd like to be a volunteer monitor, we'd love to hear from you. You can send me an email at venessa.velker.ky.gov and I'll put that in the comments in a minute. And to request an Adopt-a-Rock House volunteer application. Okay. Hi. Hello. Good morning. My name is Kinda McDonald. I'm a botanist and lycanologist with Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. And I am the lead on the Kentucky Forest Biodiversity Assessment Program and our Lycan and Bria Fight List. I'm just going to give you guys brief updates because we are behind on the schedule. So just an overview of the Forest Biodiversity Assessment Program, we plan to do a full state inventory within five years of Kentucky. And to achieve that, we are surveying 20% of Kentucky counties per year. We started this in 2019 in partnership with the Kentucky Department of Ag. This program focuses on rare and conservative forested plant species, forest community diversity and structure, herbaceous diversity, forest medicinal and species of commercial concern, invasive species and other threats, and old growth analysis. Just to give you some progress and tentative findings, we're kind of in the middle of this project three of five years of our field work have been completed. Two years have, the data has been analyzed and reported, but we're still working on year three for that. You know, since we've started, we have surveyed over 150 forest blocks and within those forest blocks, we've documented approximately 70 new populations of species of conservation concern. And that is defined by the state ranks. The state ranks go from S1 to S5, S1 being the most rare and S5 being the least rare. So species of conservation concern in this context, we include S1 through S3 species. We also have documented over 550 occurrences of united plant saver at risk species. This is an organization that determines medicinal and commercial plant species that have a lot of risk of becoming extinct due to human over harvesting. We've analyzed a lot of threats for Kentucky forests and the most prominent aggressive threat to Kentucky forests is definitely non-native invasive species encroachment. And over the last three years, three species have really stood out to us being Japanese stiltgrass, multi-floor rose, and Japanese honeysuckle. Going forward, excuse my poorly made map here. I just made it in paint to be really quick. But going forward, we have two more years of field work and every single county that is in white here are counties that need to be surveyed in the next two years. We work with public and private landowners, so I'd just like to throw it out there if you have or know of a forest block that is high quality, diverse, may have forest medicinals or species of conservation or commercial concern. You are welcome to contact me and we can talk about the property and vet it and see if it fits into this program. I'll put my email into the chat, but it's right there, kindle.mcdonald.ky.gov. So if you have a property that you think would fit into this program, please email me and we can discuss it. And this is the last thing I'm going to talk about. This is going to be really quick. Nature preserves has been working on lichen and bryophytes with partners, especially Dr. Allen Risk from Morehead State University to create the state lichen and bryophyte lists. Unlike other groups in Kentucky, lichen and bryophytes are pretty understudied and misunderstood of what we have here in the state of Kentucky. So lots of work has gone in to creating a full state lichen and bryophyte list. And once we have those lists, we are using the nature serve rank calculator to give these species a state conservation rank so we can determine their rarity and our future monitoring and management priorities for these species. We're still in the middle of this project and to be honest, I've done more with the lichens than the bryos at this point. So I can give you some tentative findings from the lichens. Right now we have approximately 680 lichen species in the state but Kentucky is still under collected mostly especially in the crust lichen area. So if someone is an expert in crust lichens eventually I expect that the number of Kentucky lichen species will go up but those are just really hard to collect and identify and you have to really have a lot of practice with those. As going through those we have over 100 potentially rare lichens and that ranking is still going on right now. I've definitely been a little more liberal with which ones are going to go through the ranking calculator but I would rather cover a little too much than not cover enough. So if you guys would like to contribute to this project it's obviously still ongoing we're not done yet. Please post any lichen or bryophyte observations to iNaturalist. There is a lichens of Kentucky project that I have been managing for a couple years now and since we've added bryophytes to this within the next couple weeks I plan on making a bryophytes of Kentucky project to manage and to pull observations from there. So if you'd like to contribute you can post lichen and bryophyte photos and observations on iNaturalist or you can send those photos to my email and again I will put that in the chat and that is all I have. Thanks guys.