Indiana Rare Plant Watch is a collaborative community science initiative between the Indiana Native Plant Society, Indiana Plant Conservation Alliance (INPCA) and the Indiana Natural Heritage Data Center (INHDC) at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources – Division of Fish, Wildlife, and Nature Preserves (DFWNP). The program aims to train community members throughout the state to provide proactive, ongoing monitoring of Indiana’s rare plant species.
What Are Rare Plants?
Rare plants are species designated as endangered, threatened, or vulnerable in Indiana, the United States, or globally. Indiana has over 400 species on the Department of Natural Resources’s Endangered, Threatened, and Extirpated Plants of Indiana list.
Plants can be rare in Indiana for a variety of reasons, ranging from widespread habitat degradation or loss, requiring a specific habitat that is itself uncommon, pressure from invasive species, including insects and pathogens, overharvesting, or being at the very edge of a species’ natural range. For these reasons, extra steps must be taken to ensure these plants do not blink out before steps can be taken to conserve them.
Rare Plant Monitoring in Indiana
Registration is now open for our second group of volunteer monitors. We’re looking for botanists and highly skilled amateurs to begin monitoring in the spring and summer of 2026. We will begin recruiting volunteers from the general public in late 2026 for monitoring assignments in 2027.
The below map shows species that will be available for monitoring and the townships where they are located. Click into the shaded townships on the map to view species locations or you can open the full-size map in a new window.
