Trend monitoring of Spalding’s catchfly in Canyon Grasslands, Craig Mountain KCA, Idaho

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Our demography work with Spalding’s catchfly from 2002-2013 indicates that trend monitoring for this species can be done in two consecutive years of monitoring repeated every 5-10 years. <br>

The primary goal for trend monitoring of Spalding’s catchfly is to assess whether the population is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable. In order to do this, an accurate measure of the number of plants in monitor plots at one point in time is needed to compare with the number of plants in these plots at some point in the future, i.e., 5-10 years later. This species has many detectability problems that can bias accurate counts if not addressed, i.e., prolonged dormancy, a major vegetative stage that is small, located on the ground surface, and is ephemeral (present early but mostly disappearing by flowering), tendency for stemmed stages to disappear by flowering time (Hill and Garton 2017). In order to determine the number of plants in prolonged dormancy, it is necessary to monitor for consecutive years to distinguish dormant plants from dead plants. Additionally, for plants with an unobservable dormant stage, all plants emerging aboveground for a growing season need to be detected with certainty or dormancy will be overestimated (Kéry et al. 2005). Not detecting aboveground plants can result in: 1) false absences that can be misclassified as dormancy and 2) underestimation of the number of plants in the plots. <br>

We conducted two Spalding’s catchfly demography studies in canyon grassland on Craig Mt., ID: a) FWS study conducted from 2004-2013 funded by USFWS (Hill et al. 2014) and b) BLM study conducted from 2002-2011 funded by BLM (Hill 2012). Each study was conducted for 10 consecutive years. Between 1997 and 1999, IDNHP botanists located and mapped many subpopulations of the species in canyon grasslands on Craig Mountain, ID. Sites for demography plots were randomly selected from these subpopulations and 17 permanent plots were established (7 plots sampled in meter-wide continuous belt transects [BLM] and 10 plots sampled in a 10 m x 10 m plots [FWS]). Over the 10 consecutive years of each study, we tracked a total of 947 plants. We conducted two complete samplings each growing season, one soon after emergence in early June and the other at flowering in late July. Both samplings included systematic ground-level searches for plants in the small rosette stage class. The results of these two studies were very similar. <br>

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Reference Code: U17HIL01IDUS <br>

Full Citation: Hill J. 2017. Trend monitoring of Spalding’s catchfly in Canyon Grasslands, Craig Mountain KCA, Idaho. Idaho Natural Heritage Program, Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Boise, Idaho. 3pp. <br>

Location: ELECTRONIC FILE - BOTANY: PLANT SPECIES: {species name} <br>

Keywords: Silene spaldingii, Spalding’s catchfly, monitoring, trend monitoring, demography <br>