Rare Vascular Plants of North Carolina's Journal

The NC Natural Heritage Program is pleased to announce that the latest publication of the NHP List of Rare Plant Species of North Carolina has been released and is now live on the Program’s website. In 2022, we have updated the list format. We hope these changes will provide you with more flexibility in finding important information. Please review the new website for details: https://www.ncnhp.org/references/publications/2022-rare-plant-list.

With publication of the 2022 list, the Project Requirements for the Rare Vascular Plants of North Carolina Project have changed to include newly listed taxa and to remove those now excluded from the latest list.

Thank you for your interest North Carolina’s rare flora.
Jame Amoroso and Brenda Wichmann

Staff of the NC Natural Heritage Program (NCNHP) are very excited to be involved with the iNaturalist community. The opportunity to share information about North Carolina's rare plants will be mutually beneficial.

Observations are used to evaluate the rarity of poorly known plants, to direct attention to special places that may need additional protection, and to monitor the status of threatened and endangered plants.

iNaturalist observation records provide minimal information as uploaded, essentially providing only presence data for the NCNHP. You can add value to your observation by including the number of plants observed and the size of the area surveyed, as well as information about their habitat (forest, trailside, roadside, wet area). This information can be included in the observation notes or by using the Observation Fields feature in iNaturalist.

Please join the Rare Vascular Plants of North Carolina Project! When you click on join you will see the list of NC rare plants that are included in the project's filter. After scrolling down (or using the 'end' key of your keyboard) you can select one of the Trust levels. The iNaturalist platform automatically sets taxon geoprivacy for taxa that are threatened by location disclosure, and this includes most of the plants included in the Rare Vascular Plants Project. By trusting this project, you will allow the project admins (and only the project admins) to access the private coordinates for conservation purposes. It is up to you whether you want to share all locations by selecting "Yes, for any of my observations" or just some by selecting "Yes, but only for my observations of threatened taxa, not when I have set the geoprivacy".

The "About" section of the Membership panel lists the Project Admins that will be able to export private coordinates. Any changes to Admins or list criteria automatically suspend the export of private coordinates for a week and sends a notification to all members to allow them time to reconsider their Trust settings.

If you have any questions, you can message ncnhp through iNaturalist.

Thank you!

I'm letting you know about some changes that are being made to the project. This project was initially created by staff of the NC Plant Conservation Program (PCP) and now includes managers from the NC Natural Heritage Program (NHP).

The focus of the project continues to be to document the variety and distribution of rare plants in North Carolina. Added observations are now restricted to state boundaries and will soon be restricted to species included on the NC rare plant list https://www.ncnhp.org/publications/nhp-publications/rare-plant-list. This list is dynamic and includes species that are listed under the Federal Endangered Species Act, species State listed under the Plant Protection and Conservation Acts, and informally listed species that have been determined to need monitoring.

The NHP conducts and maintains an inventory of known locations of rare plants, rare animals, and natural communities in the state as part of its mission to support conservation of natural areas. For more information about the NC Natural Heritage Program, see https://ncnhp.org

The PCP develops regulations, voluntary programs, and cooperative partnerships to help protect imperiled species and their habitats. PCP's responsibilities include the listing of North Carolina's Endangered, Threatened, and Special Concern plant species and the development of conservation programs designed to permanently protect these species. For more information about the NC Plant Conservation Program, see https://www.ncagr.gov/plantindustry/plant/plantconserve/index.htm

By continuing your membership in this Project and adding observations, you are allowing the Rare Plants of North Carolina Project managers and institutions to evaluate your observation for inclusion in the NHP conservation database. An important part of this evaluation is the location of the observation.

Observations of plants in iNaturalist have coordinates obscured by default based on their state rank (S1, S2, and S3). By adding your observations to this project, you can be assured that the locations of your observations are available to Project managers but not to the larger iNaturalist community. Users may choose to restrict access to individual observations for personal reasons; observations that you have set to obscured or private will not be visible to the Project managers. For more information on geoprivacy see https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy