NatureServe, Extinct Plants, and Field Stories with Wesley Knapp

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Wesley Knapp, Chief Botanist at NatureServe about NatureServe, Extinct Plants, and Field Stories.  Read his full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Showtimes:
2:03  Nic & Laura talk about Industry Innovations
7:45  Interview with Wesley Knapp Starts
12:16  NatureServe
15:45  Extinct Plants
33:15  Field Stories

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Wesley Knapp at https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-knapp-71787221/

Guest Bio:
Wesley Knapp is the Chief Botanist at NatureServe. Wes has over 20 years of experience working in the NatureServe Network as a Botanist and Ecologist with both the Maryland and North Carolina Natural Heritage Programs. He has extensive field experience across much of the United States and numerous other countries.  His research interests include identifying and preventing plant extinction events and describing undescribed plant species. Wes has a B.S. from Catawba College, a M.S. from Delaware State University, and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Chapters

• 2:03 Nic & Laura discuss Industry Innovations
• 7:45 Interview with Wesley Knapp Starts
• 12:16 NatureServe
• 15:45 Extinct Plants
• 33:15 Field Stories

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Nick and I discuss innovation in our industry. We talk to West nap about his work at nature, surf, extinct plants, and share a ton of field stories. And finally, there are more trees on earth than stars in the galaxy. According to a study published in Nature, there are about 3 trillion trees on our planet. This far outpaces the measly 100 to 400 billion stars estimated to exist in the Milky Way.

Nic 
How about that? Very cool. stuff.

Laura 
I can't take any meds even comprehend those numbers. But yeah, that's wild.

Nic 
out of it. No. I mean, you can read the study, I guess. But that seems like a lot of trees aren't just saying.

Laura 
I'm sure there's some people listening who could verify

Nic 
the nature it seemed right. You know? It seemed like an internet thing where I was like, There's no way this is true. And they're like, oh, no, it's published in Nature. Okay.

Laura 
Great. Well, if anybody thinks that's wrong, let us know. Okay, with that music.

[NAEP Event News]

Nic 
Registration is now open for NAEP's next advanced NEPA workshop on Wednesday, November 9, from 10am to 6:30pm. Eastern. These workshops are intended to provide participants with practical tips and tools about how to refine preparation and review of environmental documents prepared pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act. Check it out@www.naep.org

Laura 
And now for Nick's sponsor.

Nic 
Are you tired of being organized? This organizer, it will come into your house and destroy everything they are about four pounds and they meow a whole lot but I'm telling you, these things are for

Laura 
you. If you love that, great if you don't become a sponsor, so we can fill it with your app. Let's get to that segment.

[Nic & Laura discuss Industry Innovations]

Nic 
From his interview, we say that one of the things I did a couple of times that he talked about, this thing didn't exist in my field. So I did it. And it's not even. It wasn't even like a small little thing. It was like oh, this book is outdated by 50 years. Let me spend 10 years updating it. And that is a daunting task. It is wildly difficult to do. And it didn't faze him in the least he's like, Hey, this is a tool that's gonna be really useful for us going forward. Let's do it. Why not? Come on, let's go. And there wasn't hesitation. There wasn't fear. There wasn't any of that. He's just like, there's a need, and I'm going to fill it and I'm going to figure out how and then I'll do it. And I thought that was really really cool. Really, really inspiring truthfully, because I think a lot of times it's easy to just do what you've been doing and complain about the stuff that doesn't exist, you know, there's no there's no easier way to do this and all there is there's always an easier way. So, I don't know, I think innovation is it scares a lot of people. But there's a good balance between being wildly out there and actually doing something proactive about a need that you have in the industry.

Laura  
Yeah, definitely. I mean just being a productive person like that is fantastic. You know, last week, we're talking about resumes and stuff, just be proactive. Yeah, get out there and make stuff happen. But there's also like this whole thing in management and stuff where, you know, when you talk about innovation, there are some schools of thought that are like you have to do user testing and you have to go out and make sure your idea is going to fit a certain niche of people when really like, I think most innovations come from I need this thing. It doesn't exist. I'm gonna go make it.

Nic 
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. User testing something. If you know your industry well enough. And he worked with plants he knows that what how do I do them? What was missing in the field, then yeah, you're gonna know that this is going to be valuable. If you're talking with people in the industry, and they all are complaining about the same thing. That's a clue that maybe we need something that's not here. Yeah.

Laura 
And sometimes just because you're so in it, you yourself represent the industry and you just can kind of know by gut feeling, you know, like this thing doesn't exist anywhere. I can't find it, or the thing that is does exist doesn't work the way I want it to go make it better.

Nic 
Right. And we're seeing that happen across the board with technology in general and just being able to have easier access to information is changing a lot of the way we do what we do. And you know, it's historically a very slow process to update but now you know, instead of a three year gap between the study and the publication, time is when dumbing down to way way shorter times. And even that helps push things forward. Right, but there's still going to be gaps. There's still a lot of innovative technology in our phones that we aren't really tapping into, you know, there aren't great apps for some of what we do. And how do you do one? Policy right? It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But even just having a database, a repository for information is extremely helpful, extremely valuable. The upkeep is usually the hard part, right for what we do in the book, right? So you could, in theory, every state's regulations for water, for example, because they're all a little bit different, but you'd have to keep on top of it, you have to keep updating it and that's really, really challenging. What was your solution for that? His biggest fear app? It was, well I live in Nashville, so I can go to these places and do this. I have a friend who lives in Charlotte, they can do that there. And so that's how you do it, right? You kind of take the collaborative effort, you're getting people who are in region to help and when they travel and go into places they can add to what they're doing. You're talking about science in general, you have your colleagues and they can kind of again, collaborate. That's kind of the whole point. So there's always always solutions out there or difficult problem.

Laura 
Yeah, and I think to to your point, you don't have to try to change the world or write an entire plant out of Atlas at once no baby steps. You can start small

Nic 
and start about to start Nashville in Charlotte, you know, eventually maybe you get more people.

Laura  
Yeah, I mean, if the work solution you can start either just in your agency or department or you can start in your community and then you know, if it works for you then maybe branch out to other communities to

Nic 
perfect example of that. Working right now, like one of the things that we stumbled upon an innovative tool for using story maps to tell project basically to tell the story of our projects, right. And we were already kind of doing that internally. We started doing it externally. And clients are like, Oh, wow, this is really cool. We really like what you're doing here. Please do more of it. And that was a really nice little innovation. And from there, I'm like, Okay, well, we could do this for everything we're doing, and show that to lots of different people for lots of different reasons. So that's one of the things we're hiring a new person they're pretty here, here pretty shortly. You may know who she is, but that's one of the things that I want her to work with our team on is to build that database of projects with story maps, and it's gonna be really cool. And that's a happy accident, but there's just a little bit of innovation that came our way. Why not? Use it? Why not go forward, but it may only end up working for us, but it'll be great for us. At the very least it'll be great for what we're doing internally. Hopefully it's helpful for others as well. But you know, there's already value in it.

Laura 
That's all great. I think all those little improvements are are better than just one giant improvement, which is sometimes people are thinking is innovation and whether it needs to do but yeah, let's we're going to keep trying to find some innovations for our podcasts so Wednesdays look at those field notes going.

Nic 
Yeah, for sure. Let's get to our interview.

[Interview with Wesley Knapp Starts]

Nic
Welcome back to EPR. Today, we have widely nap, the chief botanist at nature surf, which is a leading biodiversity conservation nonprofit in the United States. Thank you, Wesley. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm gonna go and kick us off and tell us a little bit about what you do.

Wesley Knapp 
I am Chief botanist at nature surf like you mentioned. And if you're not familiar with nature surf, we work with 60 member programs across the United States and Canada to answer the three fundamental questions of biodiversity conservation, which are what is it? Where is it and how is it doing? And we collectively provide the data that better be used for about every conservation decision. In the United States and

Nic 
Canada. So when did you get into conservation? How did you get to where you are now?

Wesley Knapp 
That's a bit of a story but I got interested later in my career kind of as I got interested in field botany as an undergrad student. That was a you know, excuse the pun, a late bloomer to my love of nature. And I was lucky enough that right after undergrad from Catawba College I landed my dream job being a field lobbyist for the Maryland Natural Heritage Program. And the Maryland Natural Heritage Program is a member program of nature serve network. So if you're not familiar with neat natural heritage programs, there's one in an equivalent in every state, and then in Canada, they were called the CDC or Canadian data centers. So I have my dream job of just walking around in the woods, find the plants and trying to protect high quality natural, like ecosystems or natural areas. And then I spent 15 years in the Maryland program and I moved to a western North Carolina where I felt like I stepped into the big leagues because there's a lot of rare and ants out here compared to the eastern shore of Maryland and not not the Eastern Shore. It's just a different system. So that was really it. It was more academic. I didn't realize I'd love nature, but when I found out I could have a job or worked outside all day, and go wander and discover I was signed me up. But after 20 years or so of that have moved on to a more of a desk job behind the scenes, trying to coordinate and motivate plant conservation.

Nic 
So how was that transition like for you then was it hard to give up some of that field stuff?

Wesley Knapp 
Oh, of course. It was but it was a decision I weighed carefully because like the analogy I give is I got 43 now and every great runningback only has so many yards. Every great job on this only has so many years of climbing up 4000 foot elevation mountains like we have here in West 6000 feet elevation mountains like we have here in western North Carolina. So there were days when I was younger, I do five days of field work and then say Alright, let's do another on the weekend. My field career I do like three days a week and man this is really starting to grind on me,

Nic 
right? Oh man. I remember like there's like a wetland and I still see in my mind as like you know what I don't have to do this every day. Did you have like a specific thing or was it just kind of a gradual progression every time No, no,

Wesley Knapp 
no not at all. And trust me I'm not near the end of my field career. I still do priority field work like we might talk about some of that stuff today. But it was more like in I don't know how to explain this but here's how I will explain. I was at I was at a meeting maybe in 2019 and I looked around the room and all my friends who I'd known for 20 years plus, we all had gray beards and wrinkles. And I realized wow, we're like the established credit net. When did that happen? Is anyone know who I was? They might not think that way. They've known me for 20 years. So it's one of those things you kind of realized you were coming established and a leader in the field after a long time and I love I love nature. And I love what we do here. I think it's probably the most important conservation work that can be done in the country like what is out there. Where is it? Is it doing okay, so putting the fieldwork down was hard but it also was kind of I don't want to say fearful but my friend and had the cheese box position or I didn't she stepped down last year. And I got kinda like, well, who's gonna get that job? I hope they really know what they're doing. And after a while, I said, You know what, why couldn't I do that? And I had a bunch of people ask, Hey, what else have you applied? For that? And I was like, no, not. And eventually I was like, yeah, maybe I should really glad I did it.

Nic 
That's so great. It makes me think about like, you're you are questioning your own strength and experience even though you're perfect for the job. And it's more than every

Wesley Knapp  
imposter syndrome is real. For a lot of people quoting, right. But the full breadth of North America like the US and Canada is massive. It's like 4000 species. No one person can know that. So if you don't come into a field like that with a big questioning or doubt, self doubt you're doing it wrong.

[NatureServe]

Nic 
That's a really good point. And actually kind of leads into my next question about nature because I use the your explorer all the time. I think it's fantastic. I love the tool for exactly what you're talking about. I need to know you know where things are, how they're doing, and a little bit about what they are as well.

Laura 
With this tool. I like tools

Nic 
when I just have Explorer is like the species list where you can type in any literally any species, and it'll pop up it'll give you all kinds of basic information, where it's been seen, what its habitat is, and you know, where it occurs and all that fun stuff. So like it's a really good tool, especially when you're trying to identify areas of concern for a project that we're looking at. So it's really cool for that. I

Laura 
love using it that way for scientists or layman's.

Nic 
I mean, it's the website and literally anyone can use it. We use it in an eco world for exactly what I'm talking about. We have to backup what we say we can't just be like, You know what, nothing's here, right? We're good. We didn't even check. You know, we have to do we have to make sure we're doing it right. So that's why we use it. But I'm really curious, how does how does like the data you collect, get onto that website.

Wesley Knapp  
So that's a really insightful question. So NatureServe. I say what we do is conservation through collaboration, because we work with over 60 member programs across the US and Canada. But they're all their own little autonomous body. So we do data exchange with member programs store a centralized database called biotics where a member program let's say North Carolina where I worked. When I was a phlebotomist, I discover something. I map it geospatially in ArcView. You know that every product suck into our database, which also has a geospatial component that maintain and update all the records and third data exchange ends up in nature serve Central. So we have a centralized location of data for all the US rare plants, animals and high quality habitats. Then here at nature serve we do the conservation status assessments. So you mentioned like the rarity of these organisms, we ranked them one to five, one being the most rare and five being the most common. But that rank can be G for global and for national s for sub national, which we usually call a state rank here in the States, but technically sub national because they applied in Canada as well. So you can go on now and with a degree of competence, know that the information you're receiving from Oregon is comparable to the information you're seeing in North Carolina. It's collected under the same methodology to take into account rarity threats and trends. We have a standardized calculator to calculate those one through five ranks at the the various tiers we talked about. So I'm glad you use that site because it truly is a wealth of information.

Nic 
Yeah, it's fantastic. And knowing what goes into the on the back end, you know, there have to be challenges, right? You're talking to 60 entities. So what are some of those challenges? How do you get through?

Wesley Knapp 
Oh man, there's so many so we have staff and our Science Information Resources team who work for data exchange and quality control. But the challenges are so numerous because I mean, most listeners probably won't understand this until I say it but we don't have a good agreement about what plants surround us in the US and Canada. There's no one authoritative list. There's no one authoritative book. So like the floor of California can be interpreted differently between you know, the most recent pillars to treatment by the floor of California committee or different when you look at the floor of North America. So reconciling names in the 6 million steps behind these species are really answer that question of what is it? Because if you don't have that, right, every other question behind that decision is wrong.

[Extinct Plants]

Nic 
That's wild. And so yeah, so you have this basic background information on I'll say every plant we know that's not true. There's a lot of different things going on. But you're also you've also spent a lot of time studying plant extinctions. So what drew you to that and how does that tie into what you do?

Wesley Knapp 
So I got interested in there early in my career so 2001 I started with the Maryland Natural Heritage Program is that field botanist like I mentioned, it has quickly over my head like my job is to go up and quickly identify every plant in the field and know what screener? Well I've never even walked in Maryland before. So I studied the rare plants of Maryland book a lot like every night I was studying that thing. And there was one plant in the Maryland floor that was considered G H or globally historic and extinct. Called noddles micrantha, which is found on black water streams from New York to Virginia. And the story goes that it was not even thought to be rarer than in the 1980s Heritage botanists from throughout the region. Were looking at the different plants in the floor or trying to figure out what's rare, and this one came up with everyone in around the room just looked at each other like Well Isn't it okay where you are? Haven't you seen it and we realized no one had seen this plant since it was last collected in the 1930s so I took it upon myself to learn everything I could about it and then to find it but spoiler alert, it's extinct. I didn't but I taught Yeah, but I talked to other botanist said breed meetings I go to pay what are the extinct plants in your state and I usually get blank stares looking black back at me, because we didn't have an appreciation for what we lost. And I'm not an academic scientist. I'm a field conservation based botanist. And I thought well if we don't know what we've lost, how do we know how to prevent the next extinction? Right, so I asked a whole group of botanists from across the country. Hey, has this work ever been done? Am I missing it? And to do you want to collaborate to do this? So we began this investigation to look at the extinct plants in the United States and Canada and that's what that paper came out. And we showed you know, there were sticky three extinct plants. 64 explained taxa if you include varieties and subspecies. We found that 64% were known from just one place on the planet. We call them single site endemics, so extremely narrow, distributed species geographically, are going disproportionately extinct. And that's led me to now address the winter. So what are we going to do with this information? Well, we're going to prioritize plants with one known occurrence and try to get them protected in the field and what we call off site conservation or accede to conservation. So I get interested in just from a point of what can we learn from these conservation failures, which is an extinction that how do we prevent the next extinction? That's what conservation is all about preventing extinction like the lowest bar for success we can set?

Nic 
Right? And so you've had some successes, and I'm assuming some failures as well like finding a plant that you thought was something that you have to do a lot is it rare? Like where does it fall?

Wesley Knapp 
So rediscovering and extinct plants in extremely rare that I've had a lot of success, discovering, extirpated plants, so plants that are thought to be locally extinct, for instance, will have something extinct in Maryland, but I've rediscovered that's a rediscovery of an extra potted plant. But I was part of the rediscovery of an extinct plant this year, which was a certainly a career highlight. And we look for what they commonly call the late lead oak Quercus portfolio which was endemic to a single place in Big Bend National Park you know, yeah, it boot Canyon, which is a really remote it takes multiaxis even hike to boot Canyon. That's the only place this tree had ever been found. And we went on a scouting trip a couple years ago and found out that the location is tree was was along the trail in a remote Canyon near a spring and I made the observation there's no way that that's true is only known from the spot. It's just easier to survey that spot. Right. So we went back as a crew. This is a project collaboration with the US botanical garden in The Morton Arboretum, but I think it was nine of us from across the country came together we went to Big Bend we took Pack Mules way in multi hours into where we stayed in blue Canyon, and we explored for a week, and I'll never forget that. It was like on a Wednesday. I think we're walking through the woods, like as a search party. Maybe you know, 10 meters apart. And my friend Michael Eason literally wrote a book the wildflowers in Texas. He calls out Hey, Wes, you need to get over here. And I could tell him his voice. My II found something good. Yeah. And I'm going to show that guy, any plant. He doesn't know what the state of Texas. So I walked over immediately. It's like, wow, we haven't seen this tree. That is clearly different than the 1000 other trees we've seen at this point. So he kind of got the coop around. And yeah, we confirmed like we'd looked at the old historical collections, and we knew what it was supposed to look like. And it was a real, I'm even getting goosebumps like thinking about that experience in the field. But those are really rare moments but extremely exciting moments. So what happens after you find it so in this case, Adam blacker who's with Bartlett tree services pointed out that this tree is really not doing well. Like the stock would produce originally burned over there was a fungal infection and had a bunch of little tiny branches coming out of the main trunk which is a typical and a sign of poor health. So we've decided to do some xe to collections or those off site collections. We're taking a bunch of cuttings, we're going to graph them to other trees grown out so we have an off site stock, because we were only able to find one tree despite our week of survey. So once we have a collection off site, we have options. Do we put some back at the same place where this plant is found now? Maybe not because that is probably a sky island that's really changing. It's drying out more fire, probably not conducive for that species long term viability, but we can put it back at lower elevation places that are a little more sheltered, perhaps, or frankly, who knows what the future will hold for what we do with those collections. But we have options. And that's the first important step is have options.

Nic 
Wow, that is so cool. That's actually no, that's really really incredible. And I'm assuming to that, like you know, sometimes that when you're doing that work, you find new species, maybe that you weren't even trying to find while you're out there. So how does is that really something you set out to do when you go for these rare plants in a big band is remote people it is very remote. He's not joking. So So do you have this as an idea? Like, okay, we're we're looking for this extinct plant, but we're also looking for new plants.

Wesley Knapp 
So there's always a specific reason you're doing your fieldwork. And in this case, it was to rediscover carcass data fully, but also look at these other oats and southwest Texas that are really difficult to identify. And they also may be very rare if they're real species and that was part of the reason we went down there was to collect specimens and do some studies but you never put your blinders on as a field botanist, like your job is to inventory even if you're looking let's say I'm looking for just one specific orchid at the site. I'm looking at the flora and my job is to understand it all basically on site, or to collect a specimen of something that puzzles me, because the more and more time you spend in your region as a botanist, the better you're at it just cited identifying all the plants. And when you get to that point, and it sounds ridiculous to say because there's so many plants but this is a fine skill tool button to spend their careers honing. So if they go out and find something that's a non intended target or like a bycatch or a survey for a specific organ, heck yeah, that's a that's a great day. And of course, you're like me on

Nic 
that, and then brag to all your friends.

Wesley Knapp 
Well, it's all my plant friends who care like I'll put something on social media. And there's not a day where I post something that's like a celebration of something scientific. And my mom destroys back eek.

Laura 
Oh, your mom and my mom would get along? Yeah. Oh, that's great. It makes me think that like when I first started my career, I was doing a lot of wetland plant identification and trying to learn them all. For those people who are getting into this How does someone even go about what's the best practice for trying to learn these plants?

Wesley Knapp 
So I was super fortunate and that I was paid to do it. As a professional. I got my undergrad degree I focused in field botany and I was decent in the Piedmont in North Carolina where I got educated, but then I had to move to new place and reinvent all the plants I knew by sight. And there's no surrogate for experience that's plain and simple. Like you can go online and look at plant photos and get plant identification forums and use inet and all those kinds of things. But the truth is you have to spend a ton of time in the fields, frankly struggling with plant identification. So if you're not familiar with how plants are identified mood, like scientifically we have manuals and floors. And then you have keys which are like they're two questions posed at a time. You're supposed to work your way through flowers, pink flowers, like whatever the question, right? But that's hard to do, because there's so many plants so you kind of if you can do it right you want to learn your families by kind of site inspections, you know, oh, that's something in the rose family and that saves you a lot of time and key in a plan or, and then you can go to the roses and just start working with your key but there's no way to just download this kind of information. But I will say from my experience, I learned a lot faster when I'm with someone who really knows what they're doing. So back early in my career I was paired up with Ron Wilson, who just passed away he was a local botanical legend on the eastern shore of Maryland. And he taught me a lot of rare plants that would have taken me years to learn if I had to kill active key everything out myself. So mentors in education really go a long way for plant ID

Laura 
Awesome. That's good information. Is there also is it all just visual and using the keys or is when you find it discover a new species or something you think has ever been identified before? Is there also some level of genetic or a lab

Wesley Knapp 
evaluation? Absolutely. So what we're talking about is the level of information needed to make a decision. So when you're a field botany is going out in the woods 99 plus percent of everything you see is going to be something you're familiar with, or something you know, to look for, in those rare instances where I've discovered a new species and I've been a part of five discoveries that we've published them. We have a number of new species coming out still, every time it's been a matter of I'm walking through the site, and all of a sudden I see this plant and I'm like, what is that? I know what genus it's in. But I can't tell you what that is. And that doesn't happen very often. Like I'm usually pretty good about knowing what the thing is in the field. So then you have to ask yourself, alright, is it something new to the state that I'm not considering something I haven't seen before. So you go to the keys, and you look and you're like, none of this really fits? Because we do use our eyeballs as our primary mode of interacting with the world and that's called the morphologic species concept the way plants look. But if you want to describe a new species, it's always best to have some genetic data. So like, for instance, I'm working with collaborators right now you can see Chapel Hill and Missouri Botanical Garden and we're trying to name a whole bunch of new things to science. And it's going to be here's the visual kind of information. But also, here's some molecular data showing it's not related to the other things out there in the world.

Laura 
Awesome. So you're, obviously the expert in your field at this point in time. The book is called vascular plants in Maryland, USA, a comprehensive account of the state's botanical diversity, which is freely available through the Smithsonian. Just very cool. So what brought you to writing or being part of writing this book?

Wesley Knapp 
Where to begin with that question, so So I started that book when my daughter was born in 2007. And it was such a massive undertaking. I didn't finish it until 2022. I remember starting it on paternity leave because I took a full paternity leave with my daughter. And it was born out of kind of out of frustration. By go out in the field, I'd find some plant I didn't recognize and then I'd go to the only books we had which were like brown and brown, which was written in 1972 for the woody plants and 84 for the herbaceous plants. And routinely, this would not be in that book. But then I'd go online and find different weird attributions of this plant to the state and I realized that we don't even know what's in Maryland, right? If we need a comprehensive list, because that's like what I mentioned before, what is it where is it? How's it going? How's it doing? So the what is it is the combination of that but what plants are actually found in Maryland? Because then from there, you can make other decisions. And while doing that book, we found lots of plants that were rare that we weren't tracking in the state. We found things to exclude like things that have been attributed to the floor, but the specimens are identified wrong or was just based on the literature or whatever it is. So that is like step one foundational information for the floor of Maryland. It was just born out of frustration. like not being able to know objectively what plants are. We're in the state.

Laura 
That's awesome. Was it fun to do?

Nic  
A fun too rough word.

Wesley Knapp 
me it was intellectually stimulating, but that project really wasn't a work project. Like I did that a lot on nights and weekends. I finished it while I worked for the North Carolina program. So there's a lot of my personal time invested in so I'm sure there's some level of fun in that, but it was more that I knew we needed it. As a community and I knew no one else was doing it. So I just said, Alright, I'm going to do this big thing, because it has to be done. And then my co author, Rob Naxi. He's at the New York Botanical Gardens. He was my master's advisor, and he's been just foundational for my career. And he's revising the Gleason your conquest manual, which is the floor of the northeastern United States and adjacent Canada. So we had an interest of actually knowing what plants were in Maryland instead of perpetuating the same old literature or incorrect information.

Laura 
Awesome. How big is this book? How many basketball plants are there in Maryland?

Wesley Knapp 
Oh, he put me on the spot. Let me I'm gonna grab my copy off the shelf here. We had to summarize these data's in the introductory texts. But let's see. Yeah, so we discuss 3525 taxa document 2918 established to the state of Maryland 71% of which were native and 28% that are not native in what
___________
Wesley Knapp 
So 25 taxa, dogs now 1918 established to the state of Maryland 71% of which were native and 28% that are not native. In what we do is this is a checklist. So you're not going to use this identify plants in the field. But we give the scientific name, common name, if its native or not the rank, like how rare it is in the state, but we also cite a specimen for each plant in this book. So there's proof that this thing occurs there. And that because you know, names change over time, like someone might read like recently, someone reevaluated the ladies tresses. Orchids, and they found Oh, what was being called one species is five, and there's more than one in Maryland. So now you can go back to the specimen and figure out which one that is. And then you can find out what the other ones are in your state as well.

Laura 
You've also been featured on PBS, maybe not you yourself, like I don't know if I have all the details here. So correct me if I'm wrong on the US tree assessment. What does PBS

Wesley Knapp  
tell me about I never thought I'd end up on PBS. So that was a really interesting exercise that I came into kind of late because I started that nature serve in November. And there was an assessment to try to figure out what are all the trees in United States? Where are they and how are they doing? Like those three basic questions, and we did this was run through the US botanical garden in The Morton Arboretum, and that was kind of late to this, but nature was a critical component because we apply those conservation ranks like the G ones, G twos, etc. So we looked at all the trees in the US and Canada, and we found first we provide a checklist of all the trees, which wasn't readily available, like isn't that surprising. We didn't even know what trees were in the country. So we provide a checklist of all the trees and then we mapped some things. We looked at threats and trends, and we found if you might not know this, but the southern Appalachians are a hotspot for trees. So like Georgia comes out really high for endemic trees, Florida and California are high. Then we looked at non endemic trees which are trees found outside of the US and in the united states like California and Florida super high again, we looked at the threats and as you can imagine, a human anthropogenic causes are a big threat and disease, invasive species big threats. So we're going to see a lot of changes to our tree floor over the years and that was the point of the assessment. It's kind of a snapshot in time to see how things are doing and I really wish we had one of these from like the year 1900. So see how different the world is today with someone. You know, in 100 years, I picked up the old History assessment that's published this year and say, Wow, things have really changed since 2020 to

Laura 
cool this year. So this was recently on PBS.

Wesley Knapp  
This was very recently so the treat assessment came out I want to say September. It's a freely available publication we did in plants, people planet, and the humbling part was like the media announcement like I've been involved in various media successes before. I hate talking about myself like this. I'm making sure that's clear. My friends will give

Nic  
me no no no,

Wesley Knapp 
we're featured my work has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post but PBS is like a different level of shock and awe almost. I remember when the host came on Jeff Bennett I've seen I know like I've seen him on my magical beat video box in the living room on PBS and MSNBC for years. And all of a sudden, like I got to show the family. That piece that they did, which was really great and featured on my friends Murphy West fluid from the Morgan, my friend Johnny Townsend from the north Virginia natural heritage programs. I did a field component too. And it was really amazing and what got me the most honestly the most exciting was on my daughter's like shared a photo of that on their Instagram. It's like my 18 year old just say that you're doing something right.

Nic 
Yeah. She's asking more questions about himself now Right? Is

[Field Stories]

Laura 
that what I want to see the TV series my button is dad. We're always coming up with new TV shows over here. But now it's time for field notes, which is also like the show we want to see. You have tons of field experience and you've already told us some great stories but you've worked in Australia Canada, Central America, so give us one or two of your favorites.

Wesley Knapp 
That's a hard core All right here. Here's this ties in really well with with your audience. Back in Maryland. I was involved with environmental review, which is the process by which we use to flag special places and prevent them from being destroyed with the project. And I can't get into all the details for various reasons on this. But we want to discuss this place that we had circled on the maps and the Heritage Program for 20 years everyone eventually get on but we can never get landed on a promotion. And we got out there because they wanted to basically destroy the place. And then minutes found the biggest population of a federally listed plant in the state and then found a new plant the Pine Barrens death Camus to the state and the new like maybe 10 other rare plants, the habitat by which all these things were occurring we think is undescribed to sign it slips to the habitat itself. We didn't even know what to do. We called it the endless seep, because because it was just this terrorist, amazing seepage of water pouring out of these streams outside of Baltimore. And then and then my friend who studies subterranean aquatic organisms found a new home Scuzz he found a new skeleton to science from this site. So discovery can be really anywhere. And that's what I loved about my fieldwork the most is you never know it's up, up and then the next hill or up the next Creek and I've been so fortunate to have so many of those oh my god moments that it never got old in which was really the hard part of putting the field career now.

Nic 
Your first time in the field the first time you had to go identify stuff for work. Were you like bringing the key with you like okay, this is a plant and that's all I've got, like what was that like that first time? So I

Wesley Knapp 
can remember this the first day as a professional. I was set out to update a rare plant occurrence for a plant called Carex. Then the Steiner character, the stita and that's a sage. So if you don't know Carex it's the most diverse group of plants in the eastern United States. In Maryland, I think there's over 200 species of Carex right? So it was no like I don't know that especially as a young botanist, you don't know those plants like that's how you tell a real professional in my opinion, is that they don't shy away from grasses, sedges and rushes, right because those are really hard. They have small, tiny little flowering parts and they have unique terms, their flowering parts, what you see in the books, and I remember we had a map of where this plant is going to be. So the first total was how do we even get to this site? Because like we under s undervalue how long it takes sometimes even get to the place you need to get to and then when I finally got there, I find a couple of sessions because sessions do you're not just gonna find one, you're gonna find a whole bunch. And then sometimes so with within sedges, there's so many new verbs broken down into sections and that looks similar. You'll find more than one species in that section. So I just remember being kind of overwhelmed and I had this book, Maryland, the vascular plants in Maryland in my backpack, when all of a sudden I'm like, what, what does the word para Guinea have me? Like I don't even know what these terms are that are critical for the unification of this planet. So there was enough of all the different species that I collected a representative of different ones and I mapped different ones so I knew what collection what was what, and then went back to the office and the state botanists there Chris fry, my friend gave me my first lesson in care accident vacation in Chris actually wrote the book, The Atlas to the centuries of marriage, so there was no better teacher at that point to teach me these plans. This one will be my mentorship. It would have taken me years to understand character morphology, because it's a car group of stuff. And he was able to kind of hold my hand and bring me up to speed on how to do that. But it is super intimidating if you've never seen a plant and you have 184 options. In the right one Yeah. Okay. Where do I start? Okay.

Laura 
That's fantastic. Have you had any, like, scary moments or exceptionally funny moments?

Wesley Knapp 
I can think of a scary moment. My fight is

Laura 
Halloween today. Right? So scary, scary stories. Very

Wesley Knapp 
scary stories. The most intense steel moment I ever had was my friend Pete nine well actually went to college with he got a job in the Maryland program. Soon after I did this is but we're fast forward in like 22,000 A maybe one of our jobs was to inventory this plant the ash unknown to me virginica sensitive joint is the name of the plant sensitive joint venture, but this is a hard plants inventory. It's found in very high quality stream systems. And these are titled stream systems. So at high tide, you can access them but at low tide, you're stuck you're gonna be stranded forever. So to get to this site is a real long journey multi miles and above. It takes a long time. So we finally get to this site and the way to inventory this is you have a jumbo boat and you have to like lift and lower the motor routinely to kind of get the boat up into the marsh. So you can use binoculars to look at over the marsh and count this plant which can stand like six feet tall so it's kind of up above the vegetation even though it's not very shallow. Well, at one point, the motor shut off at one point he pulled the core to start the motor but the cord wouldn't retract. But the motor was running. He's like you just keep counting you know deal with the motor and like Okay, so I'm looking with my my hands and all of a sudden I hear like, Hey, are you okay? Like I don't think so. I lost my binoculars and look over and he's holding his thumb and blood is just pouring down. So you do like Oh, no. So I go over like what what's going on? He opens his hand and I can see the bone sticking out the side of his stop in the motor shut off, but it's still sticking out of the motor. So there's no way for me to start this moment. So I had to call 911 Thankfully, I had cell signal. I took off my shirt he wrapped up his thigh paddled it to the closest Road intersection where we met at the ambulance and I took Pete away. Then I had to get the motor started. And the medics told me Oh, it's gonna be our Scott's gonna be in surgery, blah, blah, blah. So I finished the inventory. It took me multiple hours. Back loaded up the boat, go to the hospital. They didn't even work on him yet. They're like, we're gonna send you to Mount Sinai, which was like an hour and a half drive. We're on the eastern shore of Maryland. So that's my most intense field story is that my buddy almost lost his stuff.

Nic 
But he's good. He's all good. Now. He's good. Now it's

Wesley Knapp 
done looks gross. But you're gonna kill me. What do you heard me say? Yeah.

Laura 
Oh, well, you can oh my beers that will be our that's our next segment. Um, we cannot let you go without talking about craft beer because seriously, all environmental professionals just love craft beer. I really don't know what that's all about but it's fine with me. So you love it so much that you manage your own website in your limited free time. Is that correct?

Wesley Knapp 
Well, I co manage it. My Bob Kelly and I do that for fun. I introduced Bob craft beer a few years ago. And it's funny because Bob has the palate of a child like you were military like he'd be in Paris and you need McDonald's. Like what? Come on. I'm not joking, but he loves craft beer. And I think that was like a mutual fun thing for us. Now I live in Nashville and he lives down in Charlotte. And I don't have a lot of free time. But we got talking one day about what we need as a community. It's not just you know, there's tons of information out there about what beers amazing what's next. But we wanted to know about spot like does your spot is it good for kids? Do you have a food truck? What's your merch situation? So that's the angle we kind of take in every time I travel for work. Like this year I was in Denver so I went to true which was amazing. I went to Anchorage. in Anchorage, Alaska. So every time I work I inventory space for craft beer spots. Heck, Bob's over in the Netherlands right now. And he sent pictures from Antillean and all sorts of world class breweries. And as we mentioned before, Asheville is a embarrassment of riches, and there's like 38 breweries in the county. So it's hard to I can't even keep up with my limited free time in Charlotte even has more than that. So he's done a great job of moving Dorian all the spots in Charlotte and I'm kind of behind in Asheville because, you know, not only am i Chief by Mr. Nature, sir, I'm also in a PhD program at UNC Chapel Hill and I have two teenage daughters. And so the times I don't want to make it homework. But the websites a lot of fun. Just introduce people to spots. If we didn't say it is craft beer spots.com.

Laura 
Love craft beer spots.com. Do you have a favorite spot and or flavor?

Wesley Knapp 
My favorite spot in Nashville is burial burial is just a world class brewery here in town and after the demise of what can I say that jokingly because I got bought by Budweiser aerials the place I go to. We also have a Gila koa which is a really nice spot along the river and a great food truck right to free range to kids kind of thing. But I'm uh, I can't say what I am on this podcast actually does have profanity, but there is no style. I won't drink. I'm your style, but I'm really seasonal. So like I'm coming out of like double IPA. Season in moving into stout and Porter season.

Nic 
That's so great. And, you know, we're running out of time here, Wes, but it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here. Is there anything else you want us to talk about before we let you go? Yeah, I'll

Wesley Knapp 
give a shameless shameless plug that nature surf is a conservation nonprofit. And we are deed is used by all sorts of groups to make decisions, governmental, non governmental TNC, like everybody incorporates the G ranks into their decision making when we struggle at times to find the resources to do those conservation status assessments. So we do have donors we do have an adoptive Species Program. If you love the species, you can adopt it and have some feature on our website. So just you know, if you have philanthropic Members, we are always looking for resources to do the work we do.

Nic 
Excellent, excellent. And yeah, so before we let you go, tell people where they can reach out to you.

Wesley Knapp 
Yeah, so I'm available at Wes at nature surf.org I maintain a website Wesley dash nap.com. And other than that, if you just look for WM nap, you can find my Insta, Facebook, etc, as all the things are out there. Perfect. Thank

Nic 
you so much. It is my absolute pleasure.

[Outro]

Laura 
That's our show. Thanks West for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you  everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai