This place you call home: the flora of your county

Worksheet:

This Place You Call Home: The Flora of Your County

Name: Date:

What is a flora? The plants that grow in a given area make up a flora. You can describe a flora of a wildlife management area, a park, a town, a county, region, or continent. Usually, researchers who are working on a flora for a given area will go out and collect plants. They will collect in different types of habitats and at different times of the year. A collector may go out and collect in multiple years. These plants will be deposited in an herbarium (a museum collection that houses pressed plant specimens) where they are cared for and conserved for long term use. The specimens deposited at herbaria serve as evidence that a plant occurred in a given area. It is not enough to say that something grows where it does; a specimen is the evidence, the voucher for what is observed in the field.

Who uses this information anyway? There are many ways that people use floristic data. People use state floras to identify plants. A county flora may provide information useful to farmers, such as poisonous plants that grow in the area that could be present in hay fields. Developers need to know if there are populations of rare plants in places where they plan to build. Instructors may use county floras in plant identification courses to help students narrow down the plants they might observe in their area. Gardeners may be interested in native plants that could grow well in their gardens, or they may wish to narrow down the identity of a weed that they found.

What kinds of information are usually included in a flora? A county flora often contains information about the land itself, in addition to the plants that grow there. There may be information on the soil types, the plant communities, land use, geology, topography. A state flora will include this type of information also, but it will also include a key for plant identification, and descriptions of the species found there.

What you will be doing:

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  You are going to search the Kansas State University Herbarium database and work with primary scientific data (the actual data used by scientists; in this case, it is available publicly over the internet).
  
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  With some guidance from your instructor, you are going to create a flora for your county using data from collections already in the KSU Herbarium
  
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  You will be using a spreadsheet program (i.e. Excel) to answer questions about the plant biodiversity data. Some questions are provided for you, but you will come up with your own questions.
  
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  You will work with the scientific names for plant families, genera, and species (these names are in Latin and standardized to ensure proper communication among scientists). If you would like to know the common name of a plant you encounter, refer to the following website: http://plants.usda.gov/java/
  
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  Your instructor will inform you on the form your final project will take.
  

Before we get started, think about what you know about your county:

Do you have any interesting or scenic areas that you like to visit in your county?

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Where are these places, and what kinds of habitat do you find there (e.g. prairie, woodland, farmland, park)? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Is your county mostly urban, suburban, or rural? ______________________________________________________________________________

What is the topography of your county like (does it have hills, mountains, sand dunes, canyons, is it flat)? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Useful terms

These are some words that you may use as you work on the flora of your county. Write down the definitions using resources available to you.

bedrock

biodiversity data

ecoregion

flora

land cover

land use

locality

physiographic region

topography

Flora

Your instructor may show you examples of some floras; you can also look under “Resources” and search for examples online. Below is a checklist of types of information that can be included in your county flora. You can use this to keep track of which data you are responsible for and to see how the parts fit together.

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  How many specimens in the KSU Herbarium database have been collected from your county?
  
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  When was the earliest collection made?
  
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  When was the most recent collection made?
  
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  My question: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
  
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  The search strategy used to find data for my question: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
  
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  How I will represent the data that addresses my question (circle your choice):
  

text/ table /list /graph /other

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  Summarize the flora in terms of number of ten largest families (those with the greatest number of species present). For each family name list the number of genera, and species included in it.
  

Family Name	Genera	Species

Checklist (continued)

Location and size

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  Where is the county located in the state?
  
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  How large is it square miles, in square kilometers?
  
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  What counties border it?
  
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  What physiographic region?
  
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  What ecoregion?
  

Geology and Soils

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  What is the uppermost bedrock?
  
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  Were there glaciers in your county during the Ice Ages?
  
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  Are there volcanic rocks, or limestone (deposited while under an ancient ocean?)
  
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  Are there many different soil types found in your county?
  

Topography and drainage

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  What kind of topography (rolling hills, canyons, flat) is found in your county? (you can divide your county into 4 quarters (NW, NE, SW, SE) and describe each quarter.
  
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  What is the highest elevation? The lowest?
  
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  What rivers run through your county? What lakes are found?
  

Climate

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  What are the average monthly temperatures?
  
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  Average monthly rainfall?
  

Resources

Web resources were selected from state agencies and organizations expected to have stable web sites. If for some reason the link is broken, try searching the agency name.

Common names of plants

USDA Plants Database

http://plants.usda.gov/java/

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  This site is searchable by scientific name and by common name
  
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  Pictures, maps and additional information are available here
  

Examples of Floras

Kansas State University Biodiversity Information System (BiodIS):

http://biodis.k-state.edu/digital-resources/

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  Examples of a flora for Kansas, and a flora of Wabaunsee county are digitized and available to download
  

Flora of North American Project:

http://fna.huh.harvard.edu/

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  Examples of a continent level flora (multiple volumes, in progress)
  

Pictures of KS wildflowers

Kansas Wildflowers and Grasses:

http://www.kswildflower.org/

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  This site is can be accessed through the KSU BiodIS website or through the web address above
  
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  Pictures can be searched by name or by flower color
  

Geology

Kansas Geological Survey:

http://www.kgs.ku.edu/

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  Select “County Maps” under Geology to view digital geologic maps.
  
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  Select “Bibliography” under Geology to search geologic reports and related literature. It is possible to search by county.
  
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  Select “Photo library” under Education for a database of photographs. You can select photos by county, by Physiographic region, or by Highway. All photos are available for any non-commercial use.
  

Soil

United State Department of Agriculture (USDA), Kansas Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS):

http://www.ks.nrcs.usda.gov/

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  This site has links to a number of resources including Kansas maps, distributions of soil types and information about soil classification.
  

USDA, NRCS, Kansas online soil survey manuscripts http://soils.usda.gov/survey/online_surveys/kansas/

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  Direct links to the soil surveys published for each county in KS.
  

USDA, Kansas NRCS

http://www.ks.nrcs.usda.gov/

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  This site links to information explaining what a soil survey is, how to use it, and http://soils.usda.gov/survey/
  

Kansas State Soil (document): USDA Kansas NRCS

ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/KS/Outgoing/Web_Files/News/pub/ks_state_soil.pdf

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  General, non-technical, and informative discussion of the state soil “Harney Silt Loam” along with information on the importance of soil conservation.
  

Physiography

USDA, NRCS. Kansas Physiographic Provinces http://www.ks.nrcs.usda.gov/about/profiles/physiography.html

Physiographic map from the Kansas Geological Survey

http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Physio/physio.html

Ecoregion

US Environmental Protection Agency:

http://www.epa.gov/wed/pages/ecoregions/ksne_eco.htm

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  Ecoregion map (includes NE and KS). Includes the literature used, a pdf map, information about ecoregions, and instructions on how to interpret the map.
  

Kansas Native Plant Society:

http://www.kansasnativeplantsociety.org/ecoregions.htm

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  Information about KS wildflowers, an ecoregion map showing vegetation types across the date (does not take into account current land use, but shows what the potential vegetation would likely be)
  

Follow up questions for discussion:

After you compile and analyze your data

1. 
   Do you think that your county has been thoroughly collected? Explain your answer. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
   

2. 
   Did you notice a bias in terms of what time of year the specimens were collected (e.g. were most collected in the fall)? Explain your answer. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
   

3. 
   Did you find evidence to suggest that parts of your county are better collected than others? Explain your answer. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
   

4. 
   What kind of follow up study would you design? Describe below or on a separate sheet: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
   

Student Worksheet | Your County Flora