The Utah Rare Plant Program informs objective prioritized conservation actions for Utah’s rare plants and their habitats through extensive field work and analysis. This is accomplished by targeted data collection, management, and reporting, as well as collaborations with partners.
We collaborate with a variety of partners to work towards conservation goals, including
- Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
- United States Forest Service
- Bureau of Land Management
- United States Fish and Wildlife Service
- National Park Service
- Utah Forestry, Fire and State Lands
Get Involved!
Email us: outreach@utahrareplantprogram.org
About Us
What we do: (more specific details can be found on our Ongoing Projects page)
- Maintenance of a database of approximately 250,000 observation records with metadata for plant species, the premiere plant database for Utah.
- Ongoing monitoring of known populations and
- surveying for target populations of rare species.
- Ongoing species assessments and conservation rankings (S-Ranks) through NatureServe calculator.
- Inform management and conservation actions, with a focus on safeguarding our unique flora.
- Vegetation mapping and reporting for Wildlife Management Areas, Conservation Easements, and Provo River Delta
- Consultation on native plant restoration.
Partners
Program history
The botany program of the Utah Natural Heritage Program began within the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) in 1989 when The Nature Conservancy encouraged all states to be stewards of their respective data. In 2010, the UDWR decided rare plants would best be housed elsewhere since no state agency has regulatory authority over rare plants. In 2011, the botany heritage program found a home at Utah State University. In 2016, USU hired a ‘rare plant conservation coordinator’ to assure the state had a knowledgeable representative to help create sensible conservation plans and/or carry out judicious conservation actions regarding our native flora.
Background
So why should you care about native and rare plants in Utah? Our state is one of the most interesting places in the world for plant diversity, thanks to its unusual geology and location at the intersection of several major ecological provinces. The Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, Mojave, and Rocky Mountain ecoregions all play a role in Utah, and as a result we have a very large number of native species, more than 3000 according to some sources. Additionally, our complex geologic history means an unusual amount of exposed bedrock and “barren” substrates across the state that plays a major factor in plant diversification. Isolated pockets of unusual habitat tend to drive speciation, and as a result we have at least 250 species that are endemic to Utah, meaning they grow here and nowhere else in the world!
This incredible diversity means there is also a major responsibility to protect our native biodiversity, and safeguard our endemic plant species for future generations. Many of our rare plants face a great number of threats, and it is critical to understand which threats impact which species in order to conduct effective management.