The Nationwide Plant List, October 2012

ERDC/CRREL TR-12-11 2
2 Updating the NWPL
The updating of the NWPL began in 2008 with a meeting of the National Panel
(NP), which consisted of a botanist from each of the four agencies. At that meeting,
the NP designed a strategy for accomplishing the update. The NP decisions
were published as part of the administrative record for the update (Lichvar and
Minkin 2008).
As for previous versions, the NWPL has been updated to support wetland delineation
efforts under Sec. 404 of the Clean Water Act and the Swampbuster provisions
under the Farm Bill and for use in the National Wetland Inventory Program.
To do so, the Corps aligned the NWPL with the interagency wetland
delineation manual updating effort and the regional supplements. The NWPL is
now geographically divided using the 10 regional Corps wetland delineation
boundaries across the U.S. and its territories (Wakeley 2002) (Fig. 1). To bring
the nomenclature and taxonomy up to date, the NP collaborated with Dr. John
Kartesz of the Biota of North America (BONAP) (http://www.bonap.org). Maintaining
current nomenclature is critical to having a scientifically current list.
Once the wetland plants were updated for nomenclature and were realigned geographically
to the new regions, the NP began the evaluation of indicator status
ratings using List 96 as the starting point. List 88 had 6728 species while List 96
had 7662 species. The 2012 NWPL has 7828 species. The majority of these
changes in species numbers are the result of new taxonomic and nomenclatural
interpretations published since the development of the original List 88.