[PCA] Overcoming ‘plant blindness’ crucial to saving sagebrush sea

[De Angelis, Patricia]

Reno Fish and Wildlife Service Botanist: Overcoming ‘plant blindness’
crucial to saving sagebrush sea
By Dan Hottle
June 15, 2016

**A Service botanist is teaching partners that conservation depends not
only upon what’s happening on the ground, but also what’s in the ground.**

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plant ecologist who’s every bit as tough
and tenacious as the rocky, arid land she’s trying to protect for more than
3,500 species of plants and 350 species of animals and other wildlife is
proving why the often-overlooked study of botany may hold the key to
helping save America’s vast but rapidly declining “sagebrush sea.”

Sarah Kulpa, a botanist and plant ecologist for the Reno Fish and Wildlife
Office, is leading the charge to help scientists, landowners and other
partners working on protecting sagebrush across Nevada’s portion of the
Great Basin understand that successful conservation not only depends upon
what’s happening on the ground, but also what’s in the ground.

Too often, the missing link is seeds from native plants.

“In the field of botany, there is a term we use when referring to the
inability – deliberately or not - to recognize the importance of plants for
both humans and animals in the biosphere. It’s called ‘plant blindness,’”
she said. “If we remain blind to plants, specifically native plants, we
will be blind in understanding many other aspects of how
sagebrush-dependent species rely on this ecosystem to survive."

Full article at:
https://www.fws.gov/cno/newsroom/featured/2016/Native_Seeds/index.html

Also see this short video that goes with it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlIt3Qb96Fc
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