Wendy Gibble

Showy stickseed (Hackelia venusta) is one of Washington’s most imperiled plants. Its only known population occurs in sandy soils on steep, sliding slopes in Tumwater Canyon near Leavenworth, WA. With only a few hundred individuals left, it is at significant risk of extinction without tenacious attention and stewardship. To that end, Rare Care recently completed a recovery project funded by US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) to (1) introduce plants at a new site and (2) install permanent monitoring plots in the natural population.

Working with staff at the USFWS and the US Forest Service—who manages the lands where the native and introduced sites are located—we planted 141 plugs in the fall of 2022 at a site identified using drones (see article in fall 2021 Rare Plant Press). The site has soils, aspect and slopes similar to the native site—it most closely resembles the native site’s habitat of all the sites we found. Within a week after planting, the area received over a foot of snow, providing ample moisture and a protective blanket from extreme cold for the winter.

In May 2023, we visited the outplanting to document survival over the first winter. We found 79% of the plugs had survived and more than half of them were flowering. Unfortunately, over the rest of the season the weather did not cooperate, and the area experienced below average rainfall between May and August and higher than average temperatures, conditions that are becoming more common. We revisited the outplanting site in May 2024 and discovered significant mortality, with only 17% of the original cohort surviving.

Despite poor survival in the second year, we believe more outplanting trials should occur at this introduction site. We recommend smaller, more frequent outplantings be attempted in hopes that we will capture a year with temperatures and rainfall more conducive to plant establishment. The challenging terrain makes watering impractical, but we will try adding a small amount of water (as much as we can carry up in our packs) several times during the late spring and summer to see if we can improve survival. If we successfully establish a population at this site, it will provide an additional measure of protection against extinction if the native population declines further. We hope to follow up with more plantings soon when funding is available.

In 2024, Rare Care completed the second phase of this project—installation and monitoring of 25 permanent plots within the native population. This will allow managers to understand long-term trends in the species’ abundance, promptly detect significant declines and take action as needed. The plots are set up as point counts where the number of plants can be counted each year in the plot area, in this case, a 20-meter diameter semicircle. The plots are located at the edge of known clusters of plants and in adjacent unoccupied areas where suitable habitat exists. Therefore, surveyors can make counts without walking through clusters of plants and minimize the risk of trampling or burying the plants by sliding sand.

The new permanent plots were monitored by Rare Care staff in 2023 and 2024. We counted 131 and 136 plants across all plots, respectively. Counts made by different observers in the same plots were identical for 70% of the plots, and the rest of the plots differed by no more than 1 to 2 plants. These results suggest that the permanent plots provide a high degree of repeatability in the counts between observers and between years. Going forward, Washington Natural Heritage Program will take the lead on annual monitoring of the permanent plots.

With the addition of these protective measures, it is hoped that the existing population will not only continue to survive but another can be established to build redundancy. Rare Care will continue to follow this species and work with partners to implement conservations strategies necessary to preserve this extremely rare endemic.