Vascular Plant Diversity at the Monahan Outdoor Education Center: 2024
Category
Sciences and Technology
Department
Biology
Student Status
Undergraduate
Research Advisor
Dr. Neil Snow
Document Type
Event
Location
Student Center Ballroom
Start Date
10-4-2025 2:00 PM
End Date
10-4-2025 4:00 PM
Description
Native and non-native plant species are indicators of ecosystem health and resilience. The Monahan Outdoor Education Center is a 156-acre reclaimed mined land area located approximately 1.5 km northeast of Cherokee in Crawford County. This field site is owned by PSU and is situated in the southern part of the state's historic coal mining area. A previous PSU botanist (Timme, ca. 2000) produced a preliminary but incomplete unpublished checklist of 89 vascular plant species, which we believed was significantly short of what likely occurs on the Monahan. We hypothesized that many additional species would be found with further fieldwork. To test this hypothesis, the first author collected plants almost every weekend during the 2024 flowering season. Our primary goal was to document all vascular plants among the Monahan's old fields, and forested, and wetland areas. The results revealed over 100 additional species not documented initially, which now total 139 for the property. Curiously, 45 of the originally reported species were not found during the current survey, which highlights changes in distributions through time. Our data represent a chronological snapshot of species distributions on the Monahan and serve as baseline data for future comparisons at an important field site of PSU.
Vascular Plant Diversity at the Monahan Outdoor Education Center: 2024
Student Center Ballroom
Native and non-native plant species are indicators of ecosystem health and resilience. The Monahan Outdoor Education Center is a 156-acre reclaimed mined land area located approximately 1.5 km northeast of Cherokee in Crawford County. This field site is owned by PSU and is situated in the southern part of the state's historic coal mining area. A previous PSU botanist (Timme, ca. 2000) produced a preliminary but incomplete unpublished checklist of 89 vascular plant species, which we believed was significantly short of what likely occurs on the Monahan. We hypothesized that many additional species would be found with further fieldwork. To test this hypothesis, the first author collected plants almost every weekend during the 2024 flowering season. Our primary goal was to document all vascular plants among the Monahan's old fields, and forested, and wetland areas. The results revealed over 100 additional species not documented initially, which now total 139 for the property. Curiously, 45 of the originally reported species were not found during the current survey, which highlights changes in distributions through time. Our data represent a chronological snapshot of species distributions on the Monahan and serve as baseline data for future comparisons at an important field site of PSU.
