So I work with Natural Heritage Inventory
in Vermont Fish & Wildlife,
and I work a lot with rare plants
and mapping and monitoring them in our database
across and within the boundaries of Vermont.
And we're gonna be talking today about,
specifically, about trends that we see in rare plants,
particularly around our historical extirpated
(SH / SX designation).
We'll talk about that more later.
I'm not gonna read this whole slide to you, don't worry.
But the summary of the slide is that
botany accessibility has really increased over time,
since a lot of our early documentation that we have
of plant data is-- it's been moving--
it's been moving in a direction of community science.
And I think a particularly pivotal point
was really around 1999,
when the Plant Conservation Volunteer Program was formed
in working with the Native plant Trust,
which at the time was called New England Wildflower Society.
So now there're actually a large number of volunteers
who are actually collecting a lot of really great data.
A lot of the greatest--a lot of the most detailed data
in our database comes from volunteers
in collaboration with other organizations.
And, and it's probably, at this point,
about a third of our database.
And that's a lot of the data
that I'm gonna be sharing with you:
sort of, trends that we're seeing in that.
So the nature of our data,
we can't do controlled experiments, so
we're looking at, you know, people's observations over time,
counting plants and whatnot, and yeah,
and making observations of populations
and how they're shifting there.
There are increasing studies out there,
finding ways to utilize trends like these,
but they're mostly at city and county levels.
We haven't really had the resources
to do complex data analysis,
or publish anything at state level, and we want--yeah.
Yeah, sorry, the city and town things are--
or, city and county, are outside of Vermont, really.
So we wanna be able to summarize patterns we're seeing,
because that can help us understand research questions
that we need to be asking.
So, probably a lot of you remember this little friend
who became really big news last June, I guess:
This is a small whorled Pogonia,
and the small whorled Pogonia was refound.
It was actually in a new place in Chittenden County
from the original place documented in 1902.
But it really captured the imagination across the public,
as you, as you can see from this.
The one that really made me laugh is
"Orchid Rediscovered In Vermont Thanks To a Smartphone App,"
(laughter)
because obviously the smartphone app
didn't actually find the plant.
It was actually a real human.
(laughter)
So actually--and so that, on the left,
that's Tom Doubleday who's a retired Greenhouse Manager,
I think, from--who's worked at UVM, yeah,
who stumbled on the plant at one point,
well, he didn't stumble,
but he noticed this plant and thought,
"Gee, this is a plant I don't recognize."
So he took a picture and he posted the plant on iNaturalist.
And actually Eleanor Ray is the first person who noticed,
who is actually one of our Plant Conservation Volunteers.
And she identified the plant on iNaturalist
and then John Gange, who's on the right, also went out
and they were able to relocate the plant later.
And John is the one who took these
really really captivating, stunning pictures
that really, I think, inspired a lot of people.
So that's what a lot of people have heard about this plant.
And you may have heard in the last few weeks
about another plant that also is in the news--
maybe a little smaller splash:
This is the purple crowberry.
Um, it was refound on Mt. Mansfield after,
well, the last report on Mt. Mansfield was from 1908.
And anyway, this is a really really exciting find, too.
And this was found by Liam Ebner,
who's an Adirondack Summit Steward.
But it was actually on a Summit Steward trip,
with a lot of Summit Stewards.
So I'm gonna just talk a little bit
about SH and SX designations.
So SH (state historic), um--those two plants are SX--
they're presumed extinct or extirpated.
That means that we really think
that they're not there anymore.
Like, lots of people have looked.
And in those two cases and actually a few others
in the last decade, they have still been there.
So, at this point we only have six plants
left on that SX list in Vermont.
But we still have 86 taxa on the state historic list,
which means they've been missing for more than 25 years.
But it doesn't mean that we're, maybe, less confident
that they're gone, such as that sedge, which we refound.
But, uh, we'll talk about that next.
Um, so you've all heard, maybe,
about those, like, bigger exciting finds, but who has heard
about Crataegus pisifera, the pea hawthorn--anyone?
(laughter)
Only people in Natural Heritage are into this.
This journal article just came out this month.
Crataegus pisifera, or sometimes
Crataegus succulenta var. pisifera,
depending on how you want to regard this plant.
The pea hawthorn, supposedly because these fruits
are supposed to be the size of peas,
or so said Ezra Brainerd in, like, 1900
when he collected the type of specimen in Cornwall, VT.
However, it turns out, when Art Gilman was out,
he went back to the place
where the original specimen was collected,
and he actually found some really old shrubs growing there,
and a few about nine mile down the road.
This is a global endemic species, as far as we understand,
only known from that, sort of, 9-kilometer radius.
[Student] That's awesome!
And--yeah, I know!
(laughter)
So, um, kind of exciting....
Maybe that's all I'll say about that, except
it's not shocking that people have not really been....
We don't have very much documentation of hawthorns
for a hundred years.
Art Gilman has put a lot of effort in in the last 20 years
to relocate a lot of the ones
that were documented a hundred years ago.
So, great for hawthorn diversity.
So, and here's another one, just want of many:
This is the boreal aster.
This was unreported from Vermont until 1926.
And Jacob Penner was--I was out with Jacob Penner,
who's another Plant Conservation Volunteer,
and he was like, "Hey, is that the aster we're looking for?"
(laughter)
So, anyway, still there!
And, just, a lot of our plants that are historic,
some of them are pretty obscure, as well.
So, this is rusty flatsedge, Engelmann's flatsedge...
they both were historical, but refound in the last 10 years.
That last one, on the right,
was actually found abundantly in the last 10 years,
but we don't have any historical record.
We're just fairly confident that they've always been here.
But I think they are getting more abundant.
So that's--with some species, like these,
are, like, drought annuals of drawdown shores.
We have to be there in the fall when the water's drawn down.
And so a lot of our historical records are pretty low,
are pretty poor on them.
We don't have very much, just to start with.
So, I did a graph of how often--the question is,
"How often are we re re-finding plants, versus losing them?"
Because in this era of global climate change,
you would expect we'd be losing more than we're re-finding.
And that's actually still not the case,
which is kind of cool.
And there's a lot of reasons for that, which I'll go into.
So, these blue lines are the number of taxa that--
we're just talking about vascular plants--
changed from state historic,
or if they were extirpated, to extant.
So we refound, we've refound populations,
after they were found historically.
And you can see it's generally gone up.
I'm sure I missed some,
but this is my best assessment using our database.
There's sort of a trend line that goes fairly up
in the last decade or so,
versus these ones that changed
from extant to, like, that we declared these ones
historical or extirpated.
And the reason there's these large spikes is because
we did some really large data reviews some years.
So, it's kind of jerky.
Not really clear to me-- I don't know
if we can really assess a trend line from that,
but you can see that there are
a lot more plants that we're finding
than that we're losing at the moment.
So, why would this be?
Why are all these plants increasing and recovering?
Well, actually, one thing I should say is
eleven of of these plants that we found are hawthorns.
So, like, literally nobody was looking, as far as we know,
for the last hundred years.
(laughter)
And a lot of them are still there.
And we have a lot of hawthorns in our state;
we have about 32 species documented in Vermont.
They're all native species, except one.
So that's one thing.
Also, like, maybe about eleven of these
are species that were missing for about 30 years.
So there's, like, you know, "Oh, they're gone,"
and then five years later, or two years later,
we find a new population...
and I'll talk about that later, too.
So, I guess the question is here,
"Why are we re-finding so many state historical plants?"
"Or are we?"
So, I mean, I think we can speak to the fact
that plants are incredibly resilient and adaptable.
So there is something going on,
where these plants are actually
doing some really amazing things to stay in the landscape.
I think our landscapes are also more diverse,
So they're not, they're not always
doing the same thing in the same places.
They, there's also delay in extirpations, right?
Because the plants have to go missing,
and then we have to wait 25 years and still not find them
for them to actually go on this list.
So, it's pretty delayed, by the time
that they end up on that list to start with.
And then there's a delay in detections of declines.
So, when we're just talking about declines,
it takes us a long time to even notice
that plant populations are declining.
That's why this value--this data that we're getting
from so many volunteers is really valuable;
having all this 'revisit data' to these same populations.
Because sometimes it can take 20, or,
often it can take it can take 40 years,
if you're visiting every five or ten years.
Because if they're going like this,
then it can take a while to detect the trend line
out of all of the geographic and temporal variations.
So, yeah.
And then, partly, we don't know what changes to look for.
So some of what I wanna talk about
is some of the changes that we are seeing,
so we even know what to look for.
Because I think it's kind of an emerging science, you know?
How do plant populations change in the present-day?
So, this is one plant that we feel pretty confident is gone.
And it's just in the last few years
that we changed the species to historic.
This is the fairy slipper orchid.
Um, there aren't that many pictures from Vermont,
but I found one, by Garrett Crow,
from a Vermont population in Peacham.
There were once 22 populations; they were in cedar swamps.
The cedar swamps--they're mostly all still there.
But we see a similar sort of trend
in pretty much all of the populations across Vermont.
And they're also already historical
in New York and New Hampshire, as well.
So, we don't know why they're declining.
But what we can see is that they seem to be ahead
of a number of other orchids
(and maybe mycoheterotrophic plants, in general)
that we have, maybe, half of orchid species,
particularly ones with a northern affinity.
We're seeing similar patterns of declines,
but maybe on a slower trajectory than this.
But we are seeing really concerning patterns
in our database.
Some of them, the more we look, some of them, it turns out
"Oh, that's not, you know, we're just over-, you know--."
So, some of that is, often we don't have enough populations
for it to be a statistically significant decline,
so we're not analyzing that, and sometimes we're wrong.
But sometimes it turns out that they really are declines.
So yeah, this is a paper that just came out this year.
Robert Bertin and others
looked at Franklin County, Massachusetts--
so just across the southern border of Vermont--
and they did an analysis of town data.
Like, so, data by town,
of, like, "How many towns are these plants missing from,
after 2010 versus before?"
The really interesting thing I wanna point out to you--
and of course this is anecdotal, based on
like, my analysis of our database, but--
those red ones are ones where the decline
is consistent with our data.
So, our data also shows some really steep declines,
or at least implies some really steep declines,
that I'm fairly confident about
for a huge number of those red ones.
The yellow ones are ones that could well be,
but we would need to say--
we have things pointing in that direction,
but I don't think, like--
our data's not really convincing enough yet,
based on, like--we just don't have as much data.
And then the blue ones, the blue dots I just pointed at,
are all the ones that are mycoheterotrophic.
Now, like, there aren't that many mycoheterotrophic--
like, plants that really depend on fungi
for a big part of their life cycle like that,
are not actually the majority of plants,
but they are on this list...which is really interesting.
Especially because it's so consistent with those--
oh, and also, all the ones that aren't underlined,
it's mostly just because they're not rare in Vermont,
so we're not tracking them.
There's really none on there that are rare
that we really have any data on, so we wouldn't know.
This is one of the ones at the top of the other list,
and this, in all of New England,
is showing really dramatic declines.
And we historically had--we've had, like, hundreds
of collections and population documentations.
We actually thought this was historical;
they'd been last seen in 1990.
And then in 2017 Matt Peters found two more populations.
So we can say, "Hey, they're doing great," but actually,
there's still only two populations that we know of.
And we aren't--I don't think
we're greatly overlooking the species.
And that's another mycoheterotroph.
Uh, still the largest risk, I think, to a lot of our plants
that we really understand, is loss of habitat.
This is Colchester. This is the 1973 topo underlay.
This is our--the green are our Natural Heritage--
those are our rare plants, as they're mapped
as of a few years ago, over, like, 1973.
And then this is just a few years ago. Um, aerial photo.
So you can see how much the habitat has changed,
and how the plants are just really cut off
and isolated from each other.
So even though the plants may be there,
a lot of plants, including these three on the bottom,
they're surviving, they haven't been extirpated,
but they're really clearly declining.
And essentially we can do a lot of conservation work
and we try to map them and protect them where they are,
but we're still under-resourced to prevent declines,
even if we can prevent their extirpation in the short-term.
Lupine is another one, where we only have one population
left within that map region.
And lastly, I was gonna talk about climate change.
A lot of focus on climate change has been on temperature,
at least in this region.
Often, we're always seeing global warming, but--
and that that may still be a big effect, but--
what we're seeing for a lot of plants is--
This is Jerry Jenkins' data,
that report that he submitted in, around, 2010.
What we're seeing is that the climate data are--
I guess, we're seeing a lot more effects
from changes in hydrology,
and it might be that they're easier to detect,
but those are the ones that we're seeing more
in our rare plant population changes.
In this case, he's documenting hot dry summers,
and this is what he calls a 'stairstep decline,'
which is something I hadn't really thought to look for
before that.
But we may actually be seeing in more of our populations.
Essentially, these are the long-life plants.
You can get a hot--sorry, a dry and hot--summer,
and the population can plummet, and the pop--
the plants have the ability to recover
if you give them enough time,
but as they're starting to recover,
if the stressor is getting closer and closer together,
then you can end up with a stairstep,
rather than just a decline and a recovery.
And this pattern has continued.
This is actually Matt Peters' continued survey,
more recently, and you can see that the stairsteps
have continued to go down.
This is our last population.
There were once four of them in Vermont, that we knew of.
But this is the last remaining one,
and probably won't be in the next couple decades.
Um, how much time do I have?
You can answer some questions, if you want.
Okay, I'm gonna skip over this.
But there's a lot of really interesting hydrology stuff.
Essentially, a lot of unprecedented stuff in Lake Champlain,
which has caused some really major declines
that may be, like, the first stairsteps that we're seeing
with species like dunegrass and beach pea.
And we're seeing it also on our rivers.
Essentially, summer flooding is a lot different
than winter flooding.
A lot of these plants on the shores
are adapted to winter flooding;
and summer flooding is just, sort of, unprecedented
in the way that it's happening.
Plants do go extinct.
The last thing I'll say is--
this is a little unconventional, but my critique
of this conference is we often don't spend enough time--
I feel like we spend a lot of time in our heads here,
and I just wanna give us a chance to, like, take a breath,
because a lot of this information's really heavy.
Like, change can take a lot of toll on our body,
especially when we don't talk about it.
So these are the things I've been trying to do lately,
just in terms of figuring out ways
to resist, accept and adapt,
for all the creatures that we care about,
but also for ourselves.
And especially adapting in that, like, we need creativity
and we need diversity, which means having conversations
about equity and inclusion and justice
also in our environmental work. The end!
-(laughter) -(applause)
Okay, questions? Sorry, I covered a lot. Yeah?
Do you think the trends that you were observing
in declaring things extinct versus rediscovering them
is reflective of our lack of willingness to declare,
or, our hesitancy to declare something extinct,
and the controversy that can often ensue?
Coming from the bird world,
I'm think of the ivory-billed woodpecker,
which was a huge you-know-what show....
-Yep! -(laughter)
-So, like, yeah. -Absolutely. Yeah.
I mean, I don't think we've actually added
much at all to the SX list.
We just keep taking plants off
because we never cease to be surprised.
It's amazing how much you can, like--
especially, like, Alpine's zones, we think of as
like, people have spent so much time botanizing
up in the alpine zones.
You would think that we couldn't find any plants
that we didn't know about, but we still do.
So it's really, uh, yeah, it is true.
We're hesitant to put things on that list,
to put an X on that list.
Yeah?
Aaron, is there any thought with the whole lawns to,
you know, No-Mow May, and pollinators,
of looking at, like, Colchester,
and talking about, you know, cultivating their lawns
for these species that have no way of jumping
and moving space to space to space?
It would be a great initiative for that one area,
for those plants that are, it's very clear,
that that kind of conversion could make a difference.
Yeah, that is a much longer conversation
than we could have now.
But I think, yeah, I think talking about how homeowners
how people who are living in the area
can be involved and can engage in that cause.
Yeah, it's really important.
We should probably wrap it up,
so people can get to the next topic,
but thank you very much.
(applause)