This past weekend was the Illinois Native Plant Society annual meeting, an event where plant enthusiasts gather from across the state to socialize and botanize.
This year the Kankakee Torrent Chapter of the INPS was the host and as part of the gathering I helped organize a floral bioblitz at Limestone Park.
A bioblitz is an event where experts and citizen scientists get together at a designated spot and try to catalog every living thing they can during a set time. It can be extremely valuable at discovering new species and giving the landowner large amounts of information for future management considerations.
So why do this at Limestone Park? I joined the Limestone Township Park Board more than a year ago and quickly started discovering that the park was a unique sandy dune/flatwoods habitat.
Most people who visit the park visit for the quality baseball diamonds but never set foot a few feet away on the loop trail in the woods.
Doug Kripple, also a park board member, and I have developed a restoration plan for the park based on historical maps and current habitat clues. We started invasive species management and brought back prescribed fire to the site over the last two years. Things have already started to change and this bioblitz serves to fill in our flora blind spots as well as to confirm that our management plan is on track.
This past Sunday we had 15 Illinois Native Plant Society Members from many parts of the state come to the park to conduct a bioblitz focused on logging as many plant species as we could during a two-hour event. So, from 10 a.m. until noon we worked preprinted lists of known plants of Kankakee County to use as a checklist and flags to mark species that couldn’t be identified.
We had piles of guidebooks, two microscopes, and most importantly trays of sandwiches to help with the endeavor.
In my picture you can see Paul Marcum, INPS president and professional botanist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, dissecting a sedge species with the microscope for identification.
As the event concluded the next day results started coming in. We created a project on INaturalist (app and website) so people could upload their findings and to centrally catalogue the species found.
As of writing this, we have identified 257 different plant species occurring at the park.
For the first time we found Wild Lupine, just a few plants but a sure sign our management is working. We also found many new sedge species including one that could be a county record. The elusive Michigan lily was documented at the park and we can now focus some management efforts there.
Many of the observations did come with pictures and locations which we can sort through and map our park’s sensitive habitat areas.
Sunday’s effort was a good start to better understanding our local ecology.
Finding 257 plants in such a short time on one day in June tells me that as the seasons change and more time allows, we will find many, many more. Not to mention that as we continue to heal the landscape from decades of overgrowth and lack of fire, other species will reappear from their seed bank slumber.
Thank you to all the Illinois Native Plant Society volunteers, Doug and Dana Kripple for logistical help and the rest of the Limestone Township Park District Board for their commitment to protecting and better understanding our local natural areas.
