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’s 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.
Why Should We Care?
Every native plant in Indiana fills a unique niche, and each loss has a significant impact on our ecosystems. The loss of a species disrupts food webs and can have downstream consequences, meaning that the effect on overall biodiversity can extend beyond the loss of that single species.
Because 90% of insects are specialists on just one or a few plants, losing even one species can threaten the insects that feed on that plant, the birds and other animals that feed on those insects, and so on. Therefore, working to conserve as many of our native plant species as possible helps reduce our biodiversity losses.
Rare Plant Monitoring in Indiana
Beginning in spring 2025, the Indiana Native Plant Society and the Indiana Natural Heritage Data Center, part of the Department of Natural Resources, will launch a rare plant monitoring program. This program will train community science volunteers to track population changes and identify threats to Indiana’s rare plant species.
With a rollout anticipated to span three years, the program will rely on volunteers of varying skill levels–from professional botanists to native plant gardening enthusiasts–to bridge the gap needed to better prevent vulnerable native species from disappearing from the landscape.
Get Involved
- Join a rare species monitoring team with the Indiana Plant Conservation Alliance (INPCA).
Teams are currently monitoring several priority species and will participate in a beta program that will later roll out to a general population of volunteers. - Be on the lookout for a future call for volunteers.
We’ll be recruiting retired botanists and skilled amateurs for the second phase of the program, beginning in winter 2025, and general volunteers for the second phase, beginning in winter 2026. - Be a financial supporter.
Program facilitation for the rare plant monitoring program is funded by a grant from the Sam Shine Foundation, which has a 2.5x match. Please consider donating to support these efforts.
