Annual Meeting and Special Presentation
Featuring Guest Speaker: Aaron Sims
Thursday, October 17, 2024
6:30 – 8:00 pm (via Zoom)
View the Presentation here
Schedule
6:30-7:00pm
Welcome
Herbarium Update – Lawrence Janeway, Herbarium Curator
Friends of the Ahart Herbarium Update – Emily Doe, President
7:00pm-8:00pm
Presentation by Aaron Sims
CNPS Rare Plant Inventory: Celebrating 50 Years of Innovation and Advancement of Rare Plant Stewardship and Conservation in California
Aaron Sims
Rare Plant Program Director
California Native Plant Society
For 50 years, CNPS has maintained a database of California’s rare and endangered plants. This inventory is used thousands of times a day by conservationists, researchers, consultants, naturalists and resource managers, and serves to help educate landowners and public policy makers about the importance of rare plant stewardship. Starting as index card files of plant names and locations developed by famous geneticist G. Ledyard Stebbins, the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory (RPI) has become the most innovative, publicly-available online resource for promoting rare plant science and conservation in California. Now in its 9th edition, the rare plant inventory (RPI) is a fully integrated web application that enables species maintenance functions to be performed in the same web-based program, ensuring the immediate release of the most up-to-date rare plant information to help inform conservation priorities.
Aaron Sims oversees and manages the status review process for additions and changes to the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory (RPI) and the CNDDB, as well as developing updates, maintenance, and advancements of this important conservation tool. At the same time, he supports special projects from rare plant surveys and monitoring to conservation and seed banking throughout California. Aaron has over 17 years of professional botany experience, starting out as an assistant for Dave Keil’s field botany course at Cal Poly SLO for five years, and then working in environmental consulting and as an ecologist for State Parks, where he performed rare plant and vegetation surveys, prescribed fire management, and GIS specialties before joining staff at CNPS in 2010.