 Um, so our next speaker is Devin Rogers. He is a botanist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. His talk is titled Inventory Monitoring and Management of Rare Plants in Communities in State Nature Preserves in Natural Areas. So this is going to be really interesting and I will let Devin take it away. All right, so hello, my name is Devin Rogers. I'm botanist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. I'm going to be going pretty quick through a lot of these slides and covering a lot of our recent efforts to improve some monitoring on some of our nature preserves and natural areas where we're doing a lot of management. Just to give you a little background, the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves, we're a state agency that are in charge of maintaining a system of nature preserves and natural areas. We also maintain the state rare plant list as well as listings for natural communities and animals and that includes conservation ranks and statuses for all those. We also maintain a rare species database and we protect the state-designated Kentucky wild rivers and we also administer the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund for conservation land acquisition. And this map just kind of shows a whole variety of lands that we're involved with. Some of them are state nature preserves and some of them are natural areas. Some of them are areas for which we have the conservation easement with the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund as well as some of our wild rivers corridors. We also have a team of dedicated land managers that work on invasive species and removal prescribed fire and woody removal as well as maintenance of road trails and parking lots. We also have a team of biologists that work to conduct biological surveys which then feeds back into applications of management as well as some of our conservation decisions with ranks and statuses of variety of species. And lastly we're involved in a lot of public outreach and environmental education and recreation on some of our nature preserves. We maintain a rare species database with well over 20,000 individual records of plants and aquatic and terrestrial animals as well as natural communities. And then that data not only feeds into things we do within an agency but feeds into a biological assessment tool called the KYBAT which is a self-service conservation planning tool that allows customers to submit projects and receive data within minutes and that's available at our website. Now let's give a little overview. There are six EECA regions. We saw we have preserves all over the state. There are six EECA regions where we have some preserves where we're doing some increased monitoring and management places where we've done a lot of management in the past but we're trying to step up our monitoring efforts because these are some of our most important pristine and sensitive areas. And of the places that I'll be talking about today there's approximately 15 nature preserves in natural areas where we're improving some of our monitoring. And of these these nature preserves in natural areas where we're improving our monitoring also continuing to manage them. There's approximately 75 rare and watchless plant species which are about 13.6 percent of the tract species in the state as well as 13 rare communities comprising 36 percent of the rare communities we recognize. Now if we go back to the map showing where a lot of our preserves are highlighted in these black polygons some of the areas where we are doing a lot of improved monitoring and management. And a lot of these areas were originally identified and protected following the natural areas inventory program in the 80s 90s and 2000s. This program attempted to systematically survey the entire state for the most high quality natural areas and a lot of a lot of the highest quality areas that they that they recognized ended up becoming nature preserves or conservation easements natural areas. And during that that effort there was a lot of a lot of original documentation of rare species that formed the crucial backbone of the rare species database that we continue to build on and monitor today. Now additionally at the present day we've inherited you know years of successful management on some of these preserves that we own or are involved with and we're trying to just continue that management as well as expand it. And so the focus for this talk really is about our efforts to expand monitoring for our rarest grasslands and wetlands because these are some of the places that require the most intensive management. And so because there's more frequent and more intense management we want to make sure that we have enough relevant data to be able to assess what we're doing. And lastly we're just trying to build on the excellent work of previous scientists land managers and conservationists. So broadly what we wanted to do with some of these places where we're doing a lot of prescribed fire or woody removal is revisit all known rare plant populations to get updated census data and improved mapping. In addition to lean we wanted to set out monitoring plots where we set up 10 by 10 meter plots 10 by 20 meter plots 20 by 15 meter plots different sizes all with the goal of and they're all Carolina vegetation survey methodology but all with the goal of capturing cover data for every species in a plot as well as getting rare species data for that plot and taking photos. These are permanently marked so we can go back and revisit them as many times as we need to in order to monitor changes in vegetation. And another tool we would we want to start using there's a lot of statistics that you can use with ecological data but we want to start using fluristic quality assessment. And just very briefly this is a this is a statistic that tries to get at the fluristic quality or basically like how high quality is a natural community based off of the plant species that compose that area. And you can score every species in a flora from zero to 10 those on the lower end being species that are able to tolerate disturbance to natural processes and those that we consider higher quality or have a higher score end up with that's because of their intolerance to disturbance of natural processes. And we can we can take these values in a given plot and add them up for like an average and then along with richness values which are the number of species in a plot we can enter them into statistics like the fluristic quality index which measures the fluristic quality. So why is all this important? Really some original records maybe mismaps or haven't been updated in a really long time and honestly we can't assess management without current accurate data. And then when it comes to vegetation monitoring plots rare species don't tell the whole story because we're not trying to just manage for the rare species but for the entire system. And then that quantitative data can serve as a baseline for restoration goals not only for nature preserves but also for for other conservation agencies around the state. And then the combination of the rare plant data with vegetation data yields a more holistic monitoring effort. And then lastly more botanical research is just needed on protected areas in the entire state of Kentucky. So so far we've set out a total of 146 plots and you'll see that you know 44 of those plots come from our vascular plant side of grasslands. We do have some lichen plots a couple preserves and then a lot of the other ones come from Appalachian wetlands like the acid seeps on Ein Mountain and the Cumberland Platto. So first I'm going to cover just breeze through a couple nature preserves in natural areas for which we actually have some preliminary data. Up in the outer bluegrass we have a preserve that hosts a rare community globally rare community called the bluegrass cat prairie where there's 17 track species and we're using a combination of cedar removal invasive species removal and prescribed fire to maintain this preserve. So far we set off four vegetation plots and those vegetation plots not only are trying to assess effects of fire but also to get community composition quantitative community composition data on really rare grassland species like the white lady slipper, the early false fox glove and indian paintbrush. All three of these are just a couple examples of the rare plants there but are things for which we have less than five populations in the state. So we're trying to be good with making sure that they remain healthy in going into the future and here's a photo of our bluegrass land manager Jess Lee in one of our plots out counting some rare plants. So when we go and look at some of those statistics I was talking about a second ago really we're just establishing a baseline here and we're seeing that you know there's there's pretty high fqi values and going going into the future we want to make sure that if we go back and revisit these plots that the values stay the same and we'll just use this as as one of many statistics to to monitor what is happening in the plant communities. Some fun things come out of the rare plant updates there include this well two two species that had been collected right around 1991 had not been revisited or or I should say had not been documented again in our natural heritage database since 1991 so it had been about 30 years but we were able to refine these this year it's called pecropal percula variety pseudotomintus poasaltuensis and not only did we find them we found we found a couple populations so that's that's pretty exciting and then additionally we're learning that sometimes when we revisit our preserves that we're still finding rare species that hadn't been documented for those preserves we're able to find new populations of a rare honeysuckle linus or reticulata and a rare orchid laparis lozelia. So in another region of the state one of the natural areas in this region is home to 11 state-listed species and has a state rare grassland type that we were we call the wet meadow otherwise known as a zero-hydrate prairie and we're using prescribed fire and woody removal to continue to maintain open habitat there. This protects a couple interesting species like cyrus torta drosser brevifolia and asclepius hirtella and here's here's a picture of what the habitat looks like a lot of that grass that you see in there is andropogon glomeratus and what's interesting is you see this open grassland and right behind it there's a closed canopy forest and if we don't manage this habitat it will turn into that closed canopy forest and that is not the right habitat for all the rare plants that occur there. And in November 2020 just a month ago we were able to get some prescribed fire into this system and you can just see how many how many woody stems and saplings are coming up in here which is what we want to manage against and we put three plots in the grassland and three plots in the forest just to observe some of the differences and some of it was somewhat predictable from what we're able to qualitatively observe but we are able to see that because of the decrease in tree and shrub cover we have a two to three time increase in the richness or the number of species that can occur in a given area as well as a large increase in the fluristic quality index and then lastly just further illustrating the point that we need management to keep these things open there's two to six rare plants per plot in the grassland and up to 11 in that habitat site but but zero in the forest. Now another area we're doing some interesting work to maintain open habitats is on the Kremlin Plateau where one of our preserves has five state listed species and one federally listed orchid and a state rare globally rare wetland type public Kremlin Plateau forested acid seed so where we started out just using woody removal and prescribed fire is hopefully going to happen in the future so this habitat protects a number of rare orchids like the Southern Appalachian Endemic, white fringes orchid, coastal plain species, the yellow crested orchid and another widespread rare acid wetland orchid tuberous grass. So as a result of the natural inventories natural area inventories program they were able to not only identify this rare habitat and acquire the land turn it into a preserve but they use a combination of rare plant census data vegetation plot data and management and were able to really assess how the system changed over time and they were able to see not only where their increases in rare species populations with management but also their increases in floristic richness as well as floristic quality and management is being expanded in the uplands to include more with a lot of mid-story removal and restoration of shortleaf and pitch pine savannah so we want to see how these numbers change as we change the rest of the preserve. So in some additional nature preserves where we're also doing work include some work on pine mountain where we're trying to keep way plants from encroaching on some rare wetland types and we're trying to restore some pine variants and these are some photos of some of the plots we've set up on some of the acid seeps that occur on pine mountain and while there was already a lot of mapping in some of these systems we're finding that there's a few graminoids that maybe hadn't been recognized but also there's just like just some really neat unique vegetation composition and this is part this is kind of happening with along with an effort to try and get seeds of rose begonia try to propagate rose begonia from the only population of the state which is on acid wetland or private land we want to try to find a home for it on one of our nature preserves so that it's more protected and then this is just demonstrating some of the management that has happened a lot of prescribed fire and a lot of mid-story water removal trying to restore not only the structure of pitch pine savannah but also increase the populations of yellow false indigo we as part of the effort to revisit some of the rare species populations one of our preserves we relocated or we we checked up on a population on one of our preserves that we never knew but we know now because we got updated numbers that it had over 900 plants and it's the largest population of this baptizia in the state then out on the penny rail plane we have just preliminary data for one of our preserves we have 14 tract species we're using a combination of prescribed fire cedar removal and invasive species control and we have a couple vegetation plots but it's data isn't analyzed yet so we set up plots on both wet glades as well as dry glades and we were fortunate to have mason brock a kentucky native and botanical expert join us on one of our plots where he informed us of something that really we hadn't heard about and didn't really know about which is the presence of this interesting onion species that we suspect is either allium stalatum which there's been some confusion about whether or not the plant occurs in the state but as a result of visiting this preserve with mason and him bringing it to our attention part of these monitoring efforts we're realizing there's still other rare species that we maybe need to recognize as part of our flora and potentially consider it for for listing and tracking and then also we're still finding additional rare species like in this plot as we get down we're really scrutinizing every plant trying to trying to get down close and not just notice the obvious charismatic species we're we're able to find additional rare species and then one area I guess like we don't have we have we haven't looked at a lot of the plot data yet but in the man with cave hills we have a few natural areas and preserves we're doing a lot of prescribed fire mid-story removal with mastication and we have a lot of plots out there so we're excited to see how those plots are going to help us manage habitat for gentiana puberolenta and then again as we're doing these plots we realize that there are some plants that we see in our plots that we're like well that's pretty rare we might need to consider if that's something that needs to be tracked or added to the state rip plant list and then lastly I just wanted to say that there's a lot of plants that we capture for which we capture data in these plots that are conservative but for which we do not track so we're not we sometimes these plots are the only way that we can track the status of our conservative plants and with that I thank you guys for letting me present and that's all I have to say great thank you so much Devin um I am going to uh I think we have like three minutes for questions so I'm going to go to the ones that are the most relevant to your talk uh like directed at some of the things you had said the first being from Jonathan Kubush he asks for vegetation are any estimates are there any estimates on biomass production utilization um or soil sampling that you do um there there hasn't there hasn't been soil sampling yet um nor biomass estimates uh we are I guess like our first goal was to just get the vegetation data um trying to make as much uh as much of a bang for our buck uh we we really thought like let's let's get our vegetation data and think later about whether or not we want to uh include some some additional things uh soils I do think soil samples would be a great thing for for a whole host of reasons but we have not done that yet um great uh Jeanine Simpson asks are any of the areas that you've mentioned to available for visiting perhaps with a guide or in small groups um yes some somewhat yes uh now because because we we were uh broadcasting this this to a lot of a lot of uh people we we didn't want to include specific uh plate names of some of these specific places just because of the sensitivity of the data but I know if but I know if uh if you contact uh some of the leadership that Kentucky Native Plant Society they can um they can at least lead you to some of our public preserves um and I know I know uh I know sometimes like there's been efforts with some of our private preserves to uh lead hikes on some of them um but obviously not something that we've done uh during COVID yes and then John then asked again any trifolium reflexum in your plots trifolium reflexum uh so we have um we only have a handful of populations in the state and I think all of them occur on federal land but wait there might there might be one on a state forest but we unfortunately don't have any on a nature preserve we'd like to change that um and Jonathan we'd love to hopefully utilize your research to identify uh good sites to introduce uh reflexum onto an appropriately located um preserve um so I think we're gonna end to just to keep on track there were some questions um if anyone wants to um put the answers in the chat about like what can be done with reducing mowed grass and uh trainings but um we're going to break for five minutes it can be pretty exhausting even though it's we learn a lot it can be pretty exhausting to to be on a Zoom meeting for four hours um so what I'll do is I'll just share the screen of the agenda and we'll come back together at 1110 and start the next talk and thank you it's great thank you