December 2012 Number 1 - Utah Native Plant Society

Calochortiana December 2012 Number 1
Species Act have after further surveys been found to be
relatively common. A good example of this is the
Maguire Daisy, Erigeron maguirei, which was federally
listed as threatened prior to comprehensive surveys of
potential habitat. It has since been found to be fairly
common and is recommended to be upgraded to G3
status (Clark and Tait 2007). Its ARS score (8) is lower
some other widespread species such as Epipactus gigantea
and Salix goodingii.
There are several future directions that can be taken
with this plant rarity ranking system. First, a workshop
needs to be held where botanists with knowledge of
various rare species get together and test the ranking
system with a species list. Such a workshop is tentatively
planned for 2011 to examine and finalize the
G1G2 list of 700 species in the American Southwest. A
second direction is for individual researchers to use the
ranking system in their own area of expertise and determine
how well it can be applied, how relevant it may be,
and what refinements may be needed. It is hoped that
readers of this paper will be interested in doing this. I
encourage those of you who attempt to use the system to
contact me with comments, criticisms, and suggestions.
Finally, if in the future this ranking system, or some version
of it, is deemed to be useful for conservation planning,
it then needs to be incorporated into future action
plans, regional planning efforts, conservation documents,
and heritage databases.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Walter Fertig and Steve Caicco
for stimulating discussions on how to rank plant rarity,
and to Walt for reviewing an early draft of the manuscript.
Emily Palmquist, Kyle Christy, and Meredith
Jabis provided help in literature searches and data compilation.
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