FLORISTIC QUALITY ASSESSMENTS OF REMNANT NATURAL AREAS IN THE GREATER GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN REGION: EVALUATING BOTANICAL CHANGE SINCE THE 1890s

摘要

In 1901, Emma J. Cole, a beloved high school teacher and distinguished botanist, published Grand Rapids Flora. Cole's floristic inventory remains the most comprehensive botanical study of the greater Grand Rapids, Michigan region, even though this area has experienced significant landscape alterations since her publication. To address this knowledge gap, in 2014 we embarked on a multiple-year project aimed to discover and reassess the sites Cole described, as well as to catalog other natural remnantlocations within the Grand Rapids area. This paper reports botanical inventories that were completed at eight sites within Kent County during 2015 and 2016. Plants were documented by herbarium specimens and sight records. A Floristic Quality Index (FQI)was generated for each site. Overall, 980 specimens were collected from these 8 sites, including 20 new Kent County records and 4 state-listed species. At two localities, sufficient herbarium specimens collected by Cole and her students from the 1890s allowed for direct site comparisons using FQls and Simple Matching Indices. At Mill Creek Woods, a rich deciduous forest, comparing the 1895-96 and 2015-2016 FQI values shows that the floristic integrity of the area has decreased, but not as dramatically as might be expected over the past 120 years. At Soldiers' Home Woods, also a deciduous forest, the overall size of the habitat had shrunk due to urban expansion, but the FQI comparison of the 1890s and 2015-2016 indicated only a slight drop in native species richness, yet also an increase of adven-tive species. Simple Matching Indices comparing both historic sites to today were above the similarity threshold, indicating that at the community level these habitats have not deviated significantly over theyears.