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CNPS Rare Plant Program Committee

Expertise on California’s rare plants

Established in January of 2009, the Rare Plant Program Committee (RPPC) provides expertise, on the behalf of the CNPS Rare Plant Program, related to the science and conservation of rare plants in California. A key role of the RPPC is to assist the CNPS Rare Plant Botanist in making decisions relating to the Program, including (but not limited to) those involving complex taxonomic issues related to rare plant status reviews, status review procedures, changes to CNPS rare plant policy and guidelines, and/or changes to the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory.

J.A.

Rare Plant Program Sr. Advisor

Visit granite.ucnrs.org/staff for details.

Heath Bartosh

RPPC Chair

Heath Bartosh is founder, senior botanist, and rare plant specialist at Nomad Ecology, established in 2004 and based in Martinez, California. Heath has spent his career in the pursuit of a deep understanding of California rare plants and their habitats, which began in 1998 on Channel Islands National Park monitoring rare annual plants following an El Niño year as part of his undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University. Since then his professional, vocational, and volunteer efforts have focused on the Bay Area where he has taken on a variety of leadership roles. Mr. Bartosh is considered an expert in the flora and rare plants of the Bay Area, especially in the East Bay (Contra Costa and Alameda counties). Though he has conducted extensive rare plant fieldwork throughout California, focusing on distribution, soil and geologic relationships, endemism, regional and local rarity, habitat conservation, and post-fire floristics. As Nomad's senior botanist, Mr. Bartosh ensures survey methodologies utilized during botanical resource assessments, rare plant surveys, floristic studies, and both small and large-scale botanical studies conform to current guidelines and protocols endorsed and/or developed by trusted agencies. With this background, he has managed both stewardship based and CEQA/NEPA driven projects with efficiency and proficiency. Over his time in this profession he has designed and conducted rare plant inventories on nearly 150,000 acres of land throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for various public and private clients. Between 2006 and 2016 he was the Rare Plant Committee Chair for the East Bay Chapter (Alameda and Contra Costa counties) of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS). In 2009, he was appointed to the 10-person Rare Plant Program Committee at the state level of CNPS, where he now serves as Chair. His role on these committees is to ensure these programs continue to develop current, accurate information on the distribution, ecology, and conservation status of California's rare and endangered plants; and helps to promote the use of this information to influence on site plant conservation in California. Since 2013 Mr. Bartosh been a co-instructor of the annual CNPS / CDFW Rare Plant Survey Protocol Workshop training botanists, planners, and stewards on the currently accepted rare plant survey methods for fieldwork and reporting. Starting in 2015 he helped create the CNPS Botanist Certification Program for which he currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Board of Certification. In 2016 Mr. Bartosh became one of the first professional botanists to become a Certified Consulting Botanist in California through the Botanist Certification Program (Certification # CCB-002). He is also a research associate at the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley where he pursues his research interests in East Bay and Coast Range floristics, post-fire floras, as well as serving as an instructor for Jepson Herbarium Weekend Workshops.

Mark Elvin

Mark has worked in California with rare plants for over 30 years and has been a member of the Rare Plant Program Committee since 2009. His career has focused on the study and conservation of the California flora, primarily rare and sensitive species. During his career, he has worked in the public, private, and academic sectors. He has worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 20 years. He also holds a research associate position with the UCLA Herbarium as an Assistant Project Scientist where he primarily studies conservation biology and taxonomy.

Naomi Fraga

Naomi Fraga is Director of Conservation Programs at California Botanic Garden in Claremont, CA. Her research interests include plant geography, conservation biology, rare plants of western North America, taxonomy of monkeyflowers (Phrymaceae), and pollination biology. She is particularly interested in the flora of the Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges in southern California. Naomi received her Ph.D. in Botany from Claremont Graduate University and she also holds a M.S. in Botany from Claremont Graduate University and a B.S. in Botany and Biology from California Polytechnic University, Pomona. Naomi serves as Secretary for the Southern California Botanists, Treasurer for the Amargosa Conservancy California Botanical Society, and is chair of the Environment and Public Policy Committee of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.

Julie Ann Kierstead

Julie retired as Forest Botanist for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest after thirty years, from 1989-2019, conducting rare plant surveys and managing the botany program for this 2.2 million acre federal property. Before that, in 1983, she served as the first Curator for The Berry Botanic Garden Seed Bank for Rare and Endangered Plants of the Pacific Northwest, in Portland, Oregon; and also served as the BBG Conservation Director, where she helped write the Oregon state endangered species act. Julie has a B.S. in Botany from Oregon State University and an M.S. in biology from Northern Arizona University, where she served as Assistant Curator of the Deaver Herbarium from 1979-1981. She has contributed thousands of photos, observations, and voucher specimens to CalPhotos, Calflora, and public herbaria. Her focus is on the Klamath Range flora of NW California, where she has published several new taxa and has several more in the queue. She also has recently coauthored the book, Wildflowers of California’s Klamath Mountains. She is a California certified consulting botanist, and currently serves on the Calflora board of directors. She has taught several field workshops in NW California for the Jepson Herbarium workshop series. Julie enjoys gardening (especially daffodils), botanizing, teaching, and baking.

Nancy Morin

Nancy Morin is a plant taxonomist who specializes in the bellflower family, Campanulaceae. Dr. Morin received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After a postdoctoral fellowship in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, she joined the staff of the Missouri Botanical Garden, where her great grandfather and grandfather had both been gardeners, as Administrative Curator of the Herbarium. During her 15 year tenure there she helped create the Flora of North America project, a collaborative effort to produce accounts of all the native and naturalized plants of North America north of Mexico in books and online. Twenty-two of the total thirty volumes of that work have now been published. She had various positions at the Garden, finally being the Assistant Director. After leaving Missouri Botanical Garden in 1996 she was the Executive Director of the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta, and then in 2000 became Executive Director of The Arboretum at Flagstaff, a native plant garden focused on plants of the Colorado Plateau. In 2004 she moved to Point Arena, where she continues to work on Campanulaceae and FNA. She is president of the Dorothy King Young Chapter of CNPS and has served on the CNPS Board as a director and as treasurer, and she is a member of the state Finance Committee and Rare Plant Committee.

Margie Mulligan

Margie Mulligan is an independent Botanist and a Department Associate in the Botany Department at the San Diego Natural History Museum. She has over 25 years of botanical experience with 15 years specifically in San Diego County. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Northland College and an M.S. in Botany from Miami University of Ohio. She specializes in floristics and rare plant species of San Diego County and dabbles a bit in Baja California flora. She is an avid collector with over 4,000 specimens to date. She is a board member of Southern California Botanists, founding member of San Diego Botanical Society, and teaches a botanical field course, Field Botany of San Diego County, at San Diego State University. When she is not botanizing, Margie enjoys travel, hiking, running, mountain biking, and backpacking with her kids.

Robert Preston

Robert is senior botanist with the consulting firm ICF (formerly Jones & Stokes). He has performed rare plant surveys across much of California and has been the botanical lead on many environmental impact analyses and HCPs. He has been engaged in rare plant conservation since becoming a member of CNPS in 1979, when data on rare plants was still kept on file cards and topographic maps. He has served on a number of rare plant committees, is a contributor to the CNPS Rare Plant Status Review forum, and has submitted many rare plant observations to the California Natural Diversity Database. He is the author or coauthor of many publications, has described several new plant species, and is a contributing author to The Jepson Manual second edition and the Flora of North America. Robert received a B.A. in Biological Sciences and an M.A. in Botany from California State University, Chico, and a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of California, Davis.

Shannon Still

Shannon's focus at the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden has been to help develop and lead international, national, state, and local projects in plant conservation. His research has focus on plant phylogenetics and taxonomy, species distribution modeling, the value of ex situ plant collections for conservation, and how to evaluate prioritization in collecting rare plants. Shannon has special interest in the Papaveraceae and Eschscholzia, and has current grants to study Fremontodendron. For the UC Davis campus he is helping to develop a long-term plan to manage the tree canopy.

Katie Ferguson

Katie Ferguson is a rare plant botanist for the California Natural Diversity Database (CNDDB) and has been with the CNDDB program since 2009. As a CNDDB botanist, Katie enters and maintains data for the 2300+ rare plant species tracked by the CNDDB. She is actively involved in the CNPS rare plant status review process to ensure that proposed rankings are in agreement between CNPS and CNDDB. She also evaluates NatureServe’s G and S ranks and collaborates with NatureServe and other natural heritage programs within the NatureServe Network. Katie regularly works with state and federal agencies, biological consultants, researchers, and citizen scientists to advocate for, and help streamline, data submission for rare plant species into the CNDDB. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Horticulture from the University of California, Davis. With over a decade of knowledge and experience working with rare plant data at the CNDDB, Katie continues to uphold the long-standing working partnership between the CNDDB and CNPS to support conservation of California’s most at-risk plants.