What is Floristic Quality Assessment? Why do restorations and recreations of natural systems fail or otherwise hit a successional wall? Why, once a natural remnant is degraded, is it unlikely to recover its full quality? How do nitrogen and carbon drive ecological complexity and functionality? Why are qualitative attributes important and underappreciated?
After five decades of using Floristic Quality Assessment methodologies, we have learned that there is a much larger and prescient dynamism at play – a dynamism that clearly transcends the rote application of C-values to species and sites. For any place on Earth, ecological degradation is the degradation of a site’s functional history. This history is the interwoven relationships within organisms and their home over vast stretches of time and evolutionary categorization (niches), in most cases including a Holocene-aged co-evolved relationship with human culture. It is the experience of living things codified into the very fabric of their existence – genetic and beyond – as reflected by place. In this history lies the best hope for us to understand the magnitude and amplitude to which life can aspire when life is allowed to function within its own dynamic stability and singular local geography.
Only when we fully engage with the experiential relationship of place and biology, this modern analog of indigenous knowledge, can we move forward in the efficacious monitoring and rebuilding of it – and thus in the monitoring and rebuilding of ourselves as healthful contributors to the system. Why else do we study ecology or organisms? Why else do we acknowledge and celebrate their dynamism? Join Jerry Wilhelm and Justin Thomas for a day of exploring the fuller potential of Floristic Quality Assessment and how to use it as a tool for understanding and explaining ecological function beyond the illusions we have prescribed to it.
Justin Thomas is the co-founder and Science Director of NatureCITE, a non-profit, field-based, research and education organization that focuses on the interrelatedness of evolution and ecology, especially as they pertain to natural systems management. He conducts ecological and taxonomic research and teaches field-based plant identification workshops throughout central and eastern North America. An authority of Floristic Quality Assessment, he is the co-author of the Ecological Checklist of the Missouri Flora, holds a research associateship at Missouri Botanical Garden, and serves as a scientific advisor to several conservation groups.
Gerould Wilhelm, Research Director for the Conservation Research Institute, received his Ph.D. in botany in 1984 at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His dissertation focused on the vascular flora of the Pensacola Region in Florida and southwestern Alabama. He has co-authored with Laura Rericha, the definitive compendium on local plants, the “Flora of the Chicago Region: a Floristic and Ecological Synthesis.” He is also an authority on the lichens of the Chicago region. He is also noted for his development of the Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) methodology, which has become widely adapted for use in at many states and provinces. His research efforts include explorations in our understandingng and awareness of the critical cultural relationships involved in the evolution of North American landscapes and ecosystems.
This is a one day event. Held on October 2 and repeated on October 3.
Cost is $300
REGISTER HERE via Conservation Research Institute.