Shaw Nature Reserve is home to more than a thousand plant species. Until recently, however scientists hadn’t thoroughly documented which species call the Nature Reserve home.
Starting in 2020, scientists began work on the Flora of Shaw Nature Reserve with the goal of documenting all plant species growing outside of cultivation on the Nature Reserve’s 2,400 acres.
“A comprehensive, vouchered record of all plant species occurring in the natural communities at Shaw Nature Reserve is essential to understanding and conserving biodiversity at the Nature Reserve,” said Shaw Nature Reserve Director Quinn Long. “A floristic inventory provides a baseline for monitoring ecological change, supports scientific research, and informs conservation strategies. Vouchered specimens in the herbarium provide a definitive reference for species determinations and future taxonomic revisions.”
What is a Flora?
A flora is a descriptive record of all plant species found in a particular geographic region. Typically, a flora contains species names, descriptions, illustrations of plants, geographic distribution, and other important data.
Floras can document regions as large as an entire continent and expand to dozens of volumes that take decades to compile. The Flora of China, for instance, took 25 years and yielded 22 volumes.
What is the purpose of a flora
Having an accurate record of plant life is an essential first step in botany. Floras provide a basic understanding of biodiversity in a specific geographic area, can serve as a field guide, and help scientists identify a new species. Information about native, invasive, and threatened species can support conservation efforts in a specific area.
What prompted the flora of Shaw Nature Reserve project?
When Long started as Director at the Nature Reserve, he quickly realize a complete record of all plants at the Nature Reserve didn’t exist.
There are older plant lists of flora at Shaw Nature Reserve. But, the origins of some of the information is unclear. Likely, it comprises combination of observation records and vouchered specimens, Long said.
Creating a complete, accurate flora of the Nature Reserve quickly became a top priority.
How has the plant life of Shaw Nature Reserve changed over the years?
The Garden purchased a 1,300 acre tract of land in Gray Summit in 1925 with the intent of moving its living collections to the site to save them from city smog. As pollution lessened, the Garden no longer needed a safe haven for its plants and has shifted the focus of the Nature Reserve in the decades since. The Garden’s Members Bulletin provides documentation of how the landscape changed over the past century.
in the 1920s
The original 1,300 acres comprised five contiguous farms. The landscape at that time “heavily grazed,” and “depleted native flora.” The most over-grazed areas were “rapidly becoming a kind of second-growth brushy woods.” Staff noticed erosion and top soil loss early on.
Still, some flora found sanctuary in parts of the glades and open woodlands areas. And once overgrazing ceased, native flora began to bounce back.
1930s
As early as the 1930s, staff started restoration efforts of the native flora to curb erosion and flooding, the major issues affecting the overgrazed land.
Staff described Brush Creek as a “living laboratory” for the study of watersheds and flooding mitigation strategies.
1950s
In 1953, exhibits at the Nature Reserve promoted sustainable soil practices, sustainable timber management, and other progressive land management strategies.
1980s and beyond
In recent decades it has become an ecological restoration site, with staff focusing on restoring native prairies, wetlands, glades and forests and removing invasive species.
Beginning in the 1980s, staff started converting open fields to native prairies. In 1992, the Nature Reserve team started woodland prescribed burning, an essential part of biodiversity conservation. Staff started focusing on reclaiming glades from cedar encroachment in the mid-1990s. By 2000, staff needed to remove conifers planted in the 1920s and 30s due to poor health.
In the past decade, the Nature Reserve team continued to remove non-native tree species planted in the Reserve’s former life as an arboretum.
Documenting the flora of Shaw Nature Reserve
In 2020, Shaw Nature Reserve’s conservation team officially launched the Flora of Shaw Nature Reserve project. The work builds on previous efforts to document the flora.
To date, they have 824 native species and 156 non-native plants. The Nature Reserve is home to 17 species ranked C-Value 10. This includes species like queen-of-the-prairie, Filipendula rubra, swamp aster, Symphyotrichum puniceum, Fremont’s leather flower, Clematis fremontii, and Wild Sweet William or meadow phlox, Phlox maculata.
In Floristic Quality Assessment, Coefficient of Conservatism scores, or C-Values, estimate the likelihood that a plant species is part of an intact ecosystem minimally degraded by humans. C-values run from 0-10. A C-value of 10 indicates a plant species with a low tolerance to ecological degradation. This serves as an indicator of healthy natural communities.
Returning to its Garden roots as an orchid sanctuary, the Nature Reserve is also home to four native orchid species. The ecological restoration team documented one naturally-occurring species, the putty root orchid or Aplectrum hyemale, for the first time at the Nature Reserve through the Flora project.
More native orchids will call the Nature Reserve home soon. The Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development is working on a project to introduce new native orchid species at the Nature Reserve.
“Hopefully they will take and spread into our natural communities,” said Calvin Maginel, Ecological Resource Scientist at the Nature Reserve.
Saving specimens
In addition to written documentation, scientists collect specimens of each plant species to be mounted in Garden’s Herbarium.
Herbarium mounters are working rapidly to voucher Nature Reserve specimens and digitize them through the Revolutionizing Species Identification Project.
A vouchered herbarium specimen is a dried specimen of a physical specimen stored in an herbarium to serve as a reference for future research. Its label includes the plant’s name, collection location, collection year, and the name of the collector. It can also include additional details about the plant.
Already mounted herbarium specimens have played a starring role in several Garden research projects.
Matt Austin, Curator of Biodiversity Data at the Missouri Botanical Garden, used herbarium specimens from the Nature Reserve to examine how climate change is affecting the flowering time of Missouri native plants.
Specimens collected from a pollinator study conducted by Katherine Shea, professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, continue to be of use. Nature Reserve staff are partnering with local professors and students to resample the dataset “with phenology, pollinator diversity, or similar questions in mind,” Maginel said.
Ongoing work
There is no anticipated completion date for the Flora of Shaw Nature Reserve. Botanists will continue to collect and add to the project for years to come.
“We do hope to have the majority of plant material collected, mounted, digitized, and catalogued by 2030,” Maginel said.
Catherine Martin
Senior Public Information Officer
Many thanks to Shaw Nature Reserve Director Quinn Long, Restoration and Land Stewardship Manager Michael Saxton, Resource Scientist Calvin Maginel, and Herbarium Director Jordan Teisher, for research and information contributing to this article.
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