Briggs Environmental Lab
(954) 540-0792

The easiest way to identify many plant species is to observe readily apparent features like foliage, but features like foliage  may be seasonally absent.  Therefore, when a project requires characterization of the community dominant plant species on a project site during a time of the year when these easily recognized features are absent, one must look at other persistent features of the dominant woody plants on a site and for remnant structures and features, even of herbaceous species, that persist year-round.  In addition, in this class, we explore other resources that can be considered to more fully characterize what the plant community assemblage is likely to be during the warmer time of the year, such as the plant community descriptions contained in the county Soil Surveys published by the US Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service.

 

​The first day of this course introduces students to the basics of using field guides, keys, and other resources to identify plants in the lab and in the field.  We will be looking specifically at the persistent features of woody plants like twigs, buds, bark, and fruits.  We will spend the morning examining simple procedures of identifying the handful of dominant species that are present on a given project site.  We will then spend the afternoon in the field practicing what was learned in the classroom.

 

From a regulatory perspective, hydrophytic vegetation decisions are based on the wetland indicator status of species that make up the plant community.  On the second day of this course, we will explore hydrophytic vegetation indicators and procedures designed to characterize wetland plant communities.  General guidance on the sampling of vegetation for wetland-delineation purposes is given in the Corps Manual. Those procedures are intended to be flexible and may need to be modified for application in a given region or on a particular site. The more specific, expanded guidance in the Regional Supplements to the Corps Manual on vegetation sampling is intended to supplement the Corps Manual for applications in the given regions.  Vegetation sampling done as part of a routine wetland delineation is designed to characterize the site in question rapidly without the need for detailed scientific study or statistical methods. A balance must be established between the need to accomplish the work quickly and the need to characterize the site’s heterogeneity accurately and at an appropriate scale. 

 

This course is designed to enable wetland delineators to quickly determine the handful of plants on a project site that comprise the dominant species of the plant community on the site, to assign the appropriate indicator status of each, and then to take that information and other indicators present and determine whether that plant community is hydrophytic by definition.  Where a project site lacks enough information about the plant community to determine whether it is hydrophytic, we examine how  hydrology and soil indicators can be used to assist with that determination, and how to document that on a data sheet.  Excellent resources are provided to enable the non-botanist to easily make these determinations. There is no pre-requisite education required for this course.

 

​There are 16 Professional Development Hours available for completion of this course (or an additional 8, if taken with a Basic Wetland Delineation, Soil Characterization or Regional supplement course).