This excruciatingly rare plant has been documented in only one place: along a basalt ridgetop at the Hanford Reach National Monument.
Read more »Protecting a Washington Rarity, the Endangered Desert Buckwheat
Rare Plant Profile: Basalt Daisy
Basalt daisy (Erigeron basalticus) is a cliff dweller, found exclusively along the Yakima River Canyon and Selah Creek. There you will find it tucked into crevices and cracks of the basalt cliffs formed in the late Miocene (5 to 11 million years ago). There are six known populations in Washington State. Over the past few years Rare Care has made a concerted effort to re-monitor all known occurrences, and we only have one left to visit!
Read more »Rare Care Volunteer Spotlight: Steven Clark
Each year Rare Care recognizes volunteers for their outstanding contributions. Steven Clark has been with Rare Care since the inception of our rare plant monitoring program in 2001! Since then, Steven has contributed over 320 hours and submitted nearly 40 reports. He integrates Rare Care into the biology courses he teaches at Clark College, and helps inspire the future conservation biologists of our state.
Read more »Reflections from the Alpine: Allie Howell
This summer as Rare Care Interns we worked on an alpine plant monitoring project for the National Park Service. On the surface, our job was simple: go to a site in Olympic, North Cascades, or Mt. Rainier National Parks, find the plant, map the edges of the population in the area, and usually set up a permanent plot to be monitored by the National Park Service in the future.
Read more »Prime Prairie Time
Only 90 minutes south of Seattle is an exquisite but threatened habitat: the South Sound Prairies. Prior to the arrival of Euro-American settlers, the Northwest prairie ecosystem west of the Cascades thrived under management by Native Americans, from Oregon’s Willamette Valley north to the San Juan Islands and into southwestern British Columbia. Today, less than 3% of that original habitat survives, and plants dependent on the prairies’ unique soil and topography require vigorous protection.
Read more »Rare Care's Botanical Explorations
This spring, the Rare Plant Care and Conservation program (Rare Care) launched a new initiative in partnership with the Washington Natural Heritage Program to conduct botanical surveys of several Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Natural Area Preserves (NAP) and Natural Resource Conservation Areas (NRCA). Our goal is to expand our understanding of the botanical diversity of these preserves and the flora of Washington State.
Read more »Reflections from Rare Care Intern Maya Kahn-Abrams
This year the Rare Plant Care Internship worked with the National Park Service on a project focused on establishing long term monitoring plots in alpine and subalpine ecosystems in Washington state National Parks (Olympic Mountains, Mt. Rainier (Tahoma), and North Cascades). This monitoring programs seeks to understand the effects of climate change on vulnerable alpine/subalpine communities as a whole and rare and largely endemic species in particular.
Read more »New Rare Care Focus Species: Snow Cinquefoil
Each year, the Washington Rare Plant Care and Conservation Program (Rare Care) designates a handful of species as focus species – species that we are attempting to monitor all known populations on public lands within a three to five year period. This year, we added snow cinquefoil (Potentilla nivea) to our list of focus species. In Washington, snow cinquefoil is a relic of a much colder period, when glaciers covered the northern part of the state.
Read more »Above the Tree Line in Our National Parks
The Washington Rare Plant Care and Conservation program (Rare Care) is beginning a new initiative with the National Park Service to monitor rare plant species in alpine communities and bank their seeds in the Miller Seed Vault. This work will occur over the next three years at: Mount Rainier, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks (NP). The primary goals are to improve our understanding of the vulnerabilities of sensitive alpine plants to climate change and to develop management strategies to alleviate impacts of a warming climate.
Read more »Staff Spotlight: Stacy Kinsell
Stacy Kinsell is the Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator for the Rare Plant Care and Conservation Program (Rare Care), but it hasn’t been a straightforward path to get there. Kinsell’s undergraduate work was in social work and urban studies. After school, she packed up for an adventure in a new city far away from her native Georgia and moved to Seattle. She quickly fell in love with the city, but not the career and after a few years of working in her new field, Kinsell was feeling burnt out.
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