June 2022 Newsletter

May has been an extremely busy and exciting month for us. Our first “annual retreat” in over 2 years, education and outreach, volunteer activities, restoration work, networking, and much more are some of the many activities that SGI has been involved with this month. Read this newsletter to hear about all our exciting news and announcements, be reminded of our recent blog articles, and find out the hot topics being discussed in our Facebook group.

 

News and Announcements

Members of the SGI team walking through an open woodlands savanna filled with flowers and scattered trees.

During their retreat, SGI team members visited some of Arkansas’s prairies, glades, and open woodland / pine-oak savannas to learn first hand about these grassland ecosystems.

  • SGI co-founders Dwayne Estes and Theo Witsell were jointly awarded the Garden Club of America’s Zone Conservation Commendation for Zone IX, which covers Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.

  • Fifteen Team members met in Arkansas to learn about the grassland ecosystems of the region and to discuss SGI goals and the directions we want to move in the future. We appreciate the generous donation that made this retreat possible.

  • Plant Conservation Manager, Cooper Breeden, and Native Seed Program Director, Marcello De Vitis, attended the National Meeting of the Center of Plant Conservation (CPC) at the Denver Botanical Gardens. Cooper gave a talk about SGI’s work to protect and preserve rare, threatened, and declining species and habitats in the Southeast.

Mason Brock and private landowners talking about a flower Mason found.

Mason Brock, SGI Botanist and APSU Herbarium Manager, shows landowners a species of Penstemon he found while looking at their grassland remnant with SGI / Quail Forever Interior Plateau Coordinator, Jeremy French, and SGI Interim Communications Director, Shannon Trimboli.

  • SGI Executive Director, Dwayne Estes and several of our partners and supporters attended the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize award ceremony in New York to celebrate the American Prairie. We appreciate the generous donation that made this trip possible.

  • The work that SGI, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Mississippi Entomological Museum are doing in powerline rights-of-way on the Cumberland Plateau was featured in a blog by the Pollinator Partnership.

  • Our SGI / Quail Forever / NRCS partnership Field Biologists have been busy visiting private landowners to discuss and assist with restoration and management activities and recommendations.

APSU student, Aurelia Christy, checking a small mammal trap while working on the Soak Creek restoration project’s small mammal survey.

  • Austin Peay State University Assistant Professor / SGI Research Associate, Catherine Haase, along with two APSU students and a student from Lincoln Memorial University conducted a small mammal survey and a bat acoustic survey at the Soak Creek restoration project we are working on in conjunction with TennGreen Land Conservancy, Panther Creek Forestry and other partners on the Cumberland Plateau.

  • Zach Wood, SGI / State Botanical Garden of Georgia’s Georgia Grasslands Coordinator, participated in a population count of royal catchfly (Silene regia) at the only natural population of this species in Georgia.

  • Eight SGI members toured the Google Prairie and Dunbar Cave restoration sites to discuss management plans and visions for each site. These plans will help guide our activities on both sites as well as communicate with the stakeholders what our ultimate vision is for each site.

  • Responding to a request by SGI Volunteer Coordinator, Laura Hunt, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed an official proclamation making June 20 - 26, 2022 Tennessee Pollinator Week. Tennessee Pollinator Week will run in conjunction with National Pollinator Week. With this proclamation, Governor Lee joins other governors across the country in recognizing the importance of our pollinators.

Ted giving a Power Point presentation.

Ted Brancheau, SGI / Quail Forever Biologist, presenting at  the joint meeting of the Kentucky Pollinator and Kentucky Monarch Working Groups.

  • Jodi Morgan, Youth Outreach Coordinator, participated in Career Day at Holly Springs Elementary School in Holly Springs, GA. This was a combined effort with Cherokee County Master Gardeners and Cherokee County Farm Bureau.

  • Theo Witsell, SGI Chief Ecologist, and Alan Weakley, SGI Chief Botanist, were guests on the Campfire Conversations podcast to talk about the importance of our Southeastern grasslands. The episode went live on May 31. Thank you Three Rivers Land Trust for this opportunity.

  • Marcello De Vitis, Native Seed Program Director, visited the federal seed laboratories in Idaho.

  • Ted Brancheau, SGI / Quail Forever Biologist, and Shannon Trimboli, SGI Interim Communications Director, attended the joint meeting of the Kentucky Pollinator and Kentucky Monarch Working Groups at John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky. Ted gave a presentation on the federal RCPP program and reversing declines in grassland biodiversity.

SGI Volunteer, Rebecca Johnson collecting Phlox pilosa and several other species for the Plant It Forward Tennessee project as part of SGI’s Native Seed Program.

  • The field botany team for the Cumberland Plateau powerline rights-of-way project jointly conducted by SGI, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Mississippi Entomological Museum, and the Electric Power Research Institute successfully completed the spring vegetation sampling season. They documented many exciting grassland plant species including finding a new population of a rare carnivorous plant.

  • The SGI Native Seed Program has been busy surveying prospective sites and collecting seeds from spring flowering plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. The seeds collected will be included in SGI's Seeds of Success - Southeast and Plant It Forward Tennessee projects.

 

Recent Blog Articles

Featured
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Project Update: More Good Finds From the Cumberland Plateau Powerline Grasslands

In early May I made the familiar drive east across Tennessee for a week of field work in and around the large Tennessee Valley Authority powerline corridors that cross the surface of the Cumberland Plateau. This work is part of a multi-year study looking at the value of these open rights-of-way to grassland biodiversity, specifically to plants and their insect pollinators.

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SGI Participated in the 2022 Great Smoky Mountains Wildflower Pilgrimage

Zach Irick, SGIs Southern Appalachian grasslands coordinator, recently co-led a “Grasslands and Woodlands of the Smokies” hike for the annual Great Smoky Mountains Wildflower Pilgrimage in Cades Cove, with Dwayne Estes and SGI-APSU graduate research assistants, Gabby LeFevre and Jared Gorrell.

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Southeastern Grasslands Initiative Staff Attended the Center for Plant Conservation National Meeting 2022

Earlier this year, SGI became an official partner of the Center for Plant Conservation (CPC), an organization that advances the science and practice of rare plant conservation by making sure its partners are equipped with the resources to best save plants. In particular, these partners – or as CPC calls them, Participating Institutions – are organizations that maintain ex situ rare plant collections. This could mean live plants in a botanic garden or seeds in a seed bank. With the establishment of our Conservation Seed Bank which focuses on rare and declining grassland plants, we were a perfect match to partner up with CPC.

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Searching for Porter’s Goldenrod in 2022

Over a century ago the botanist and Presbyterian minister Thomas Conrad Porter collected a rather elusive plant in Jasper County, Georgia (southeast of Atlanta). Upon collecting it, T.C. Porter identified it as one species. Half a century later in 1902, his nephew, the famous botanist John Kunkel Small, author of the original Flora of the Southeastern United States, took another look at his uncle’s collected specimens. He recognized the specimen as a species new to science and named it after his esteemed uncle – Solidago porteri, or Porter’s Goldenrod. After that, T.C. Porter’s pressed plant specimens sat nestled away in the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and were promptly lost to the annals of history. That is, until another century and change later when SGI’s Executive Director Dwayne Estes discovered a new population in south-central Tennessee nearly 250 miles from where T.C. Porter originally collected it in Georgia in 1846.

 

3 Most Popular New Discussions this Month from the Southeastern Grasslands Ecology, History, and Biodiversity Facebook Group

  • A member shared an article about a new species of grass that was discovered in Florida after a series of controlled burns at the University of Central Florida’s Arboretum.

  • A member shared an article about research on a declining species of milkweed in Missouri.

  • A member shared photos of the wildflowers blooming in a couple of Illinois prairies.

 

If you like what we’re doing, please consider donating to SGI.

All donations are tax deductible through the Austin Peay State University’s dedicated fund for SGI.

Thank you to all of our partners, volunteers, supporters, and friends!