December updates for Time to Restore

Time to Restore

Hello USA-NPN,

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in the Time to Restore project! This is part of our monthly series of newsletters for those participating in the project in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. If you know others who may be interested in this newsletter, please send it their way! If you were forwarded this message, you can sign up to get on our list here.

Need some help getting started? Find training materials and other resources on our Time to Restore page. Or, reach out to your State Coordinator with the contact information listed at the bottom of this email.

Plant of the Month: Frostweed, Verbesina virginica

Photo: Melody Lytle

Each month, we will feature one of the plants on the Time to Restore list. Frostweed (Verbesina virginica) has been identified as a priority species in Texas. The range of this species spans from Texas and Oklahoma east to Florida and up into the lower Midwest. This is one of two species in the Verbesina genus on our Texas priority list; the other species is Verbesina encelioides, cowpen daisy, also known as golden crownbeard.

Frostweed is named for its tendency to exude water when temperatures drop below freezing. The water is pushed out of small holes in the stems, often forming ice crystals in fascinating shapes.

You can observe this species as a single plant in Nature's Notebook. If you have more than one plant, consider monitoring 2-3 individuals at the same site to capture the variation between plants. If you have multiple plants growing together that are difficult to differentiate, register the plant as a patch and make your observation considering the patch as a whole.

When considering flowers for frostweed, ignore the larger white ray flowers and focus on the small disk flowers that contain the reproductive structures.

For the plant pictured below, you would report:

Flowers or flower buds - yes

Open flowers - yes

Fruits - no

Ripe fruits - no

Photo: Alan Cressler

As for the optional intensity questions, remember to count the flowers as inflorescences.

For the photo on the bottom left, for the question "How many flowers or flower buds?", you would select the bin 3-10 flowers, as there are 7 inflorescences.

For the photo on the bottom right, for the question "What percent of flowers are open?", you would select the bin Less than 5%, as only a few of the disk flowers have reproductive parts visible out of several hundred individual disk flower buds.

Photos: Virginia Botanical Associates (left), Steven Schwartzman (right)

Questions? Reach out to Erin@usanpn.org.

Additional resources

New species rubrics help with identifying flowers and fruits

In addition to on the ground data collection through Nature's Notebook, another aspect of the Time to Restore project is mining herbarium records (plants that are pressed and preserved in a "plant library") for flowering and fruiting information. The USA-NPN has two undergraduate students, Monica and Abhiram, who are assessing herbarium specimens this year.

To get to know the species they will be assessing, the students put together species rubrics to show what these plants look like as the start flowering and progress through to seed production. Here is an example rubric for last month's featured plant, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).

If you have any feedback on the rubric for the students, please let us know and we'll pass it along!

Trail signage inspiration to recruit new observers

Moncus Park is a Local Phenology Program in Lafayette, Louisiana tracking pollinator plants including common buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), eastern purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), and button eryngo (Eryngium yuccifolium).

The Park has a set of signs to recruit new observers and inform observers where their monitored plants are located. QR codes take observers to the Time to Restore website to let potential new participants know how to get involved in this effort.

You can learn more about Local Phenology Programs here and even request your own!