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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.
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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: Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana | |
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Photo: Gina Lloyd
Each month, we will feature one of the plants on the Time to Restore list. American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) 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 Mid-Atlantic.
You can expect to see this plant bloom in late spring, and put on its bright purple fruits in the fall and winter.
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.
For the plant pictured below, you would report:
Flowers or flower buds - yes
Open flowers - yes
Fruits - no
Ripe fruits - no
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Photo: Gina Lloyd
As for the optional intensity questions, remember to count the flowers as inflorescences.
For the photo below, for the question "How many flowers or flower buds?", you would select the bin 11-100 flowers, as there are at least 17 (and likely more) but certainly less than 100.
For the question "What percent of flowers are open?", you would select the bin 5-24%, as these inflorescences are either entirely open or entirely closed, and there are 4 out of about 17 open, which is 24%. Remember to ignore any dried flowers in your reports.
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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 aid the in this project, the students have created species rubrics that showcase the life cycle stages of these plants through photographs.
These guides may be useful to you as well in helping assess the life cycle stages of Time to Restore species! You can now view the suite of species rubrics that our students have created here.
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Species rubric for butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa | |
Training options in your state | |
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Louisiana
Interested in organizing a training for your group in Louisiana? Reach out to Gina Lloyd to schedule.
Texas
We have several upcoming virtual trainings in Texas in coming weeks that anyone is welcome to join:
- Project Presentation for Cross Timbers Chapter of TMN (Fort Worth) - Thursday, January 23, 2025 @ 7:00 p.m. - Via Zoom
- Project Presentation for Elm Fork Chapter of TMN (Denton) - Thursday, January 30, 2025 @ 10:00 a.m. - Via Zoom
- Project Presentation for Cradle of Texas Chapter of TMN (Brazoria) - Wednesday, February 12, 2025 @ 9:00 a.m. - Via Zoom
Please email David Gwin, Texas TTR Coordinator, at dgwin@ymail.com (yes, that's a y!) for the meeting’s Zoom registration link you are interested in joining. Thanks!
Interested in organizing a training for your group in Texas? Reach out to David Gwin to schedule.
As you can see in the table below, we recently added a few new Texas counties in East Texas that are represented by Master Naturalist and NPSOT chapters that have already approved the project. We are looking to expand to more counties in the South and East parts of Texas. Let us know if you are already planning on participating in the project but your county is not represented below!
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| North Texas Counties | Dallas, Denton, Cooke, Kaufman, Montague, Parker, Rockwall, Parker, Wise | | Central Texas Counties | Bell, Hays | | East | Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, Tyler | | Southeast Texas Counties | Austin, Brazoria, Brazos, Burleson, Colorado, Fayette, Fort Bend, Galveston, Grimes, Harris, Lee, Leon, Madison, Montgomery, Robertson, Walker, Waller, Washington, Wharton | | | |
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Gina Lloyd
Time to Restore Louisiana Coordinator
ginalloyd113@gmail.com
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