KNPS is organizing several work days at state nature preserves and natural areas in Franklin County on November 8 and 15, and December 6. Volunteer activities involve manually removing invasive shrubs, such as bush honeysuckle and privet. Assisting in invasive species management at these sites will have a direct impact on rare plant recovery as the sites are designated as critical habitat for federally listed plants.
Once you are registered, you will receive instructions via email a week prior to the workday(s) you signed up for with directions to the site. Workdays are from 10:00am – 3:00pm and volunteers should bring lunch, water, steady boots, gloves, and loppers if you have them. Also, please arrive on time to sites as we may be hiking in to where the field work will be conducted. If you have any questions about the workdays, email jessica.slade@ky.gov.
Please join us by registering and help us restore these rare plants and communities, and build up the local botanical community along the way!
For this year’s fall meeting, KNPS and West Sixth Brewing invite you to Native Plant Day at the West Sixth Farm in Frankfort, KY. Join other native plant enthusiasts to hear updates about the society, partake in a native plant and seed exchange, and join us on a hike to see a globally rare plant.
Event Schedule (subject to change):
11:00AM to 11:30AM – Register for Native Plant/Seed Exchange; meet other native plant enthusiasts.
11:30AM to 12:30PM – Lunch and review of KNPS 2019 activities and plans for 2020. West 6th Farm has food trucks and beverages on site. You can also bring your own lunch.
12:30PM to 1:00PM – Break
1:00PM to 2:30PM – Native Plant & Seed Exchange Bring native plants and/or seeds you can exchange for other plants or seeds. Guidelines:
Must be native and pest-free.
Please label plants (label tags and markers will be available at event).
No endangered species.
Keep seed packets at roughly 15 seeds/packet.
Maximum 5 entries.
2:30PM to 3:30PM – Native Plant Hike West 6th Farm is one of the few locations in the world where Braun’s rock cress (Arabis perstellata) is found. We will take a short (optional) hike to view this species. The hike will be led by Heather Housman of the Woods and Waters Land Trust.
This
should be a great event. It is open to KNPS members and non-members
alike. If you are a member, you can renew your membership for 2020 at
a discounted rate. If you are not a member, you can join at the
discounted rate. We will be also selling KNPS T-shirts, stickers, and
native orchid posters.
There is no cost for the event, but in order to plan effectively, we are requesting pre-registration. If you are likely to attend, please fill out this REGISTRATION FORM. Thanks, hope to see you there!
KNPS’s native plant stewardship certification program is making a comeback in 2020! KNPS organized this successful program for 7 years but has put the program on hold since 2017. But now, KNPS is planning to offer this series again for professionals, students, landowners, citizen scientists, and anyone interested in learning more about native plant identification and stewardship. This 6-part program will train you on native plant ID basics, Kentucky’s botanical and natural community diversity, invasive species ID and management, rare and native plant management, seed collection, native plant gardening, and more. The goal of the program is to train more botanical stewards/guardians in the state and ultimately connect these graduates with native plant stewardship projects across Kentucky. If you are interested in the coordinator position or would like to help with the program by participating as an instructor, please contact us at KYPlants@knps.org!
Duties of the coordinator position
include:
Emailing
class participants and instructors a few times a month prior to
classes
Distributing/mailing program
packets to class participants
Emails and phone calls about
general program logistics
The Lady Slipper, the newsletter of the Kentucky Native Plant Society, has been published since 1986 (see all back issues here). Published three to four times a year, The Lady Slipper contains a mix of news, upcoming events, and articles about the native plants of Kentucky.
With this issue (Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2019) we are changing the format of The Lady Slipper, to a blog format on our website
We are in need of someone willing to take on the job of Editor. The editor solicits and collects articles for each issue. The articles are put into the WordPress blogging platform and then formatted and edited. Experience with WordPress would be great, but even if you are not familiar with WordPress, the Society’s webmaster can help you quickly come up to speed.
If you love native plants and like to edit and organize articles, we would love to have you on the team. If you have any questions or have an interest in helping out, just email KYPlants@knps.org
Kentucky Native Plant Society is looking for your help to assist with monitoring Cumberland Plateau pine barrens remnants along roadsides and powerlines in the Daniel Boone National Forests (DBNF). This is a rare plant community in eastern Kentucky. Pine Barrens are open woodlands made up of a mix of sandstone outcrops, grasslands, and open pine-oak woodlands with an open understory. Historically, pine barrens were maintained by periodic fire keeping the understory and canopy open. Due to logging and fire suppression, this community is greatly reduced and altered in Kentucky. The majority of the remnant pine barrens in Kentucky are restricted to powerline corridors and roadsides in the DBNF. Consequently, many of the plants once associated with this plant community are also rare. Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum) for example, is restricted to this habitat in Kentucky and can be found primarily on roadsides of the DBNF. Population numbers of wood lily have plummeted in recent decades. Numerous other plants of concern also depend on this habitat including Ten-lobed False Foxglove (Agalinis decemloba), Yellow Wild Indigo (Baptisia tinctoria), Bearded Skeleton-grass (Gymnopogon ambiguous), Southern Crabapple (Malus angustifolia), Appalachian sandwort (Minuartia glabra), Racemed Milkwort (Polygala polygama), Hairy Snoutbean (Rhynchosia tomentosa), Chaffseed (Schwalbea americana), Eastern Silvery Aster (Symphyotrichum concolor), and Roundleaf Flameflower (Talinum teretifolium).
Knowing where plants occur is the first step towards protecting them. If you wish to help, please fill out this Signup Form and we will give you a section of DBNF roadside/powerlines to monitor over the coming growing season. We will utilize the smartphone app iNaturalist as a means of documenting the rare plants you find.
The
app iNaturalist has grown from a graduate project at U.C. Berkeley to
a global community of naturalists looking to connect people and
nature through technology. The goal of the app is to allow citizens
scientists, like yourself, to record biodiversity. Photographs taken
with your smartphone are uploaded to the app, along with location
data, where naturalists from across the world help identify the
organism. By posting your photographs, you can contribute to a better
understanding of the range and abundance of plants and animals.
Kentucky Native Plant Society will track your photographs of plants
along DBNF roadsides in an effort to protect these rare plants and
remnant ecosystems. Hopefully, these efforts will go a long way
towards protecting the Cumberland Plateau pine barrens remnants and
the rare plants associated with them.
Citizen Scientists contribute to continental scale study to assess variation in nitrogen use of red maple (Acer rubrum)
By: Steve Gougherty* * PhD Student, Finzi Lab, Department of Biology, Boston University
Nitrogen dynamics in plants
In
terrestrial ecosystems, plant growth is commonly limited by the
availability of nitrogen. Nitrogen is a critical element for plant
health as it is incorporated into key molecular structures such as
chlorophyll, which absorbs light energy during photosynthesis, and
enzymes (e.g., RuBisCo, which is responsible for fixing carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis). Many plants
start life with a nitrogen reserve in their seeds, but eventually
come to rely on their root system to absorb nitrogen from the soil to
satisfy their demand.
Acquiring
nitrogen from soil can be a costly endeavor for plants, and perennial
plants have developed strategies to more efficiently use the nitrogen
they have already acquired. For example, deciduous trees effectively
recycle nitrogen at the end of each growing season through a process
known as foliar nitrogen resorption. Foliar nitrogen resorption
involves the breakdown of nitrogen containing compounds (like
chlorophyll and enzymes) in the leaf and the transfer to other
tissues in the plant, such as developing buds. In fact, the breakdown
of chlorophyll in leaves and transfer to other plant tissues is
partially responsible for the ‘fall colors’ in eastern temperate
forests. Even though researchers know that foliar nutrient resorption
is an important component of tree’s annual nitrogen budget,
extremely little is known about how variable this process is
throughout geographic ranges of plants. This is an important question
because understanding the nature of nitrogen limitation on plant
productivity is an active area for ecologists studying energy and
carbon balances of ecosystems.
Citizen Scientist role in addressing questions about red maple nitrogen use
Red maple
(Acer rubrum)
is one of the most abundant and broadly distributed tree species in
North America (Figure 1; green shading shows approximate
distribution). Its abundance and broad distribution makes it an
excellent candidate to assess the potential for variation in key
nutrient retention strategies, such as foliar nitrogen resorption.
However, sampling red maple throughout its geographic range is a
major logistical challenge for an individual researcher. As a result,
I started a Citizen Science project that invites participants to
sample red maple leaves in their local areas and send them to a
research laboratory for processing and analysis. A broad network of
Citizen Scientists is ideal for this project for several reasons: 1.
Citizen Scientists know where to find red maple trees in their local
areas. 2. The network allows for the potential to obtain samples from
nearly the entire geographic distribution of red maple in the United
States. 3. Since Citizen Scientists sample locally, it makes the two
sampling time points (once when leaves are green, and once at leaf
fall) feasible.
2019 was the initial year of the project and over 120 Citizen Scientists signed up to participate in the project (Figure 1; magenta dots). As leader of this project I am extremely grateful for the response we have received and look forward to disseminating our results to our Citizen Scientists and the scientific community over the course of the project. Participants interested in collecting in 2020 are welcome to sign up on our website at any time.
Getting involved in the project
Interested members of the Kentucky Native Plant Society and readers of The Lady Slipper are invited to learn more about the project at our website: sites.bu.edu/tasper . On our website we have more information about our research questions along with a signup form for participants, and sampling protocols.
