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Spring 2005
Rare Plants Rise Up!
In a world of hostile invaders and shrinking territories, hundreds of rare plant species are making a stand. Their strongest allies are crouching in a prairie near you.
By Sheryl De Vore
OFTEN HIDDEN WHERE MOST OF US WILL NEVER SEE IT, a rare plant species slips away, quietly, like a dissipating cloud.
But not in Chicago Wilderness. While at least 500 plant species in Chicago Wilderness are listed as threatened or endangered in Illinois or are teetering on the edge of that list, a network of humans has embraced these plants, tracking their health and watching their every move in order to learn how to save them. “We are the stewards of their habitats,” says Marlin Bowles, plant conservation biologist at The Morton Arboretum.
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Monitors found that the small white lady’s slipper, Cypripedium candidum, had been poached. Now more policing is done in the area.
Photo by Carol Freeman.
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These rare plants are integral to the whole network
of biodiversity, says Susanne Masi, research botanist at
the Chicago
Botanic Garden. To have a fully functioning ecosystem, we need every
unique part. Not only do plants provide indispensable services
to humanity — supplying
food and shelter for insects and birds, converting carbon
dioxide to oxygen, and helping to clean air and water — but they
are wondrous and beautiful. Quite simply, says Bowles, “Rare plants
have a right to exist.”
Vital Reconnaissance: Plants of Concern
To save a rare plant, you have to know it. Not as a passing acquaintance, but as an intimate friend, almost as kin. You must join that individual in encountering its biggest life challenges, observe its personal growth, even know what it smells like first thing in the morning. And if you don’t in the beginning, you will by the end.
Spreading out over more than 113 sites in six counties, some 200 Chicago Wilderness volunteer monitors have gotten to know at least 122 of the region’s rarest plants through the Plants of Concern Project led by Susanne Masi.
Volunteers train in early spring, where they swear an oath of secrecy. When the precise time window arrives, they visit a designated area and search for the distinctive blooms they have committed to memory. These monitors use a global positioning system to map the location of the plant, allowing them to find, record, and measure it each year. They also document the immediately neighboring plants.
“We’re not just doing a scientific exercise,” says
Masi. “We are learning how management strategies and techniques
affect these populations of plants.” The program shares its information
with 54 landowners, including forest preserves, state and local governments,
park districts, and private landowners.
“As a result of monitoring, we have found new locations of species,” says Masi. For example, monitors have found at least two new populations of dog violet, Viola conspersa, and Wood’s stiff sedge, Carex
woodii.
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Hill’s thistle.
Photo by A.B. Sheldon/Root Resources. |
“We have found 80 percent of these rare plant locations are impacted by invasive species,” Masi says. In the four years since the program started, Masi can already cite examples in which monitoring has helped land managers better protect rare plants. Monitors observed that a rare serviceberry species doesn’t like fire and is highly susceptible to deer browse. So the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County is creating deer barriers as well as firebreaks around some of these small trees when they conduct controlled burns.
Monitors also found that white lady’s slipper, Cypripedium
candidum, had been poached, so now more policing is done in the area.
Another monitor found that a staff member at a public preserve had inadvertently mowed through a population of eared false foxglove, Tomanthera
auriculata, before its seed could be dispersed. “Because eared false foxglove is an annual plant, loss of seed could threaten the population,” Masi said.
Plants of Concern now monitors more than 30 percent of all the places where listed species grow in northeastern Illinois, and the goal is to monitor 75 percent. They’ve only just begun.
Monitor Falls in Love
Maggie Ingalls admits she is sometimes overwhelmed with despair about the fate of the environment. But her volunteer work as a plant monitor for the dog violet, Viola
conspersa, has given her a renewed sense of hope. Each spring, Ingalls and a few other monitors head for one particular meadow in Lake County where dog violet grows. Ingalls checks on her violets, counting the number of leaves and the pale purple flowers, noting new germinations or missing plants.
She says it’s sometimes difficult to walk through tick-infested areas or go waist-high in thickets of thorny plants. Sometimes she thinks, “I must be crazy. This isn’t even comfortable.” But mostly she thinks, “This is just where I need to be. This is full of wonder.”
Ingalls says she has come to know the place she monitors in greater depth than she has ever known a natural area.
“Of course, I have fallen in love with my Viola,” she adds. “And I am excited to be part of a scientific endeavor, to be contributing to humanity’s knowledge of the world in which we live.”
Clockwise, left to right: Dog violet, Pitcher’s
thistle, and Savanna blazing star.
Photos by Janet Novak, Marlin Bowles, and
Gerald D. Tang.
Network of Knowledge: Center for Plant Conservation
The Morton Arboretum and Chicago Botanic Garden belong to a network of 35 organizations in the United States working together through the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Plant Conservation to save the earth’s rarest plants from extinction.
Each participating organization has taken certain
species under its wing, says Kayri Havens, director of
the Institute
for Plant Conservation Biology at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The
Chicago Botanic Garden and The Morton Arboretum are working
on nine imperiled species from Chicago Wilderness. They
study the plants down to the genetic
level — in the field, the lab, and special gardens such as The Arboretum’s
Rare Plant Collection — to learn what they need to survive. Scientists
are learning a lot. For example, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Pati
Vitt has discovered that hand-pollinating 30 percent of
the flowers on one eastern white fringed orchid benefits
the plant and increases seed
production.
As part of the Millennium
Seed Bank Program, the organizations also collect seeds — often
with the help of volunteers — for long-term storage in a controlled
environment. It’s just one more way to bank the species’ survival.
Left to right: Purple fringed orchid and Eastern white fringed orchid.
Photos by Doug Sherman and Carol Freeman.
Science at Work: Neighbors Pitch Illinois a Thistle
A success story is blooming in the sand dunes of Chicago Wilderness. Scientists have reintroduced the federally threatened Pitcher’s thistle, Cirsium
pitcheri, to Illinois by using seeds and plants from populations in Indiana and Wisconsin.
“The plant was once part of Illinois’ native flora,” says Marlin Bowles of The Morton Arboretum, who is working on the project with Chicago State University’s Tim Bell and scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Seeds were planted in the early 1990s, “But the initial planting is meaningless unless the plant reproduces on its own,” Bowles says. So for at least a decade, these scientists have been monitoring both the Indiana and Illinois populations, as well as doing lab research on thistle survival traits. The scientists say they are getting closer to their goal of creating a viable Illinois population.
Monitoring leafy prairie clover.
Photo by Gerald D. Tang.
Want
To Help?
Volunteers can become plant monitors, restore degraded
habitats, grow seed plants in the garden, become active
advocates for land management — even donate funds.
(Plants comprise nearly 70 percent of the species on the
federal threatened and endangered list, yet only about 8
percent of funds to help listed species goes toward plants).
For more information, call (847) 835-6873. Plants
of Concern trains new monitors in April and early May.
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