A rare species has been found on a 19-acre native prairie remnant in Newton County. Noah Brown's Prairie is an upland dry-mesic chert prairie in Diamond.
Vice President of Science & Management for the Missouri Prairie Foundation Bruce Schuette – who has a prairie named after him in Polk County – was visiting the native remnant in Newton County in April when he came upon a depression in the ground that had water standing in it. He heard the calls of the eastern narrow mouthed toad, which was breeding in the depression and stopped to take a look.
"And there's a rare species we already knew about in the pond, a type of arrowhead called the Kansas arrowhead and just a lot of other vegetation," he said. "And I noticed this white flowered plant different than the other ones around it, and I wasn't sure what it was, so I went ahead and got a few pictures of it and came back and identified it the best I could. And then I checked with several other people to make sure that that was correct, and it was."
What Schuette had found was a plant that has a couple of common names – tansy dog shade and pinnate dog shade – which was undocumented at the site before he discovered it. Its scientific name is Limnosciadium pinnatum.
"It's in the carrot family, and it is listed as a critically imperiled species in Missouri," he said. "Rare species are given in our — plant species are given an 'S' value from one to five, with one being the most critically endangered and five being...very abundant. And this was an 'S1,' so it was exciting to find a new plant that I was unfamiliar with."
Missouri has a Species and Communities of Conservation Concern (SOCC) checklist maintained by the Missouri Department of Conservation and other state and federal agencies and organizations.
Schuette said pinnate dog shade is found only in a few counties in Missouri and in states to the south and southwest. He said Noah Brown's Prairie is also home to a couple of other rare plant species, including the Kansas arrowhead and Barbara's buttons.
He said this highlights the need for organizations like the Missouri Prairie Foundation, which works to preserve the state’s remaining native grassland communities, including native prairies that have never been plowed. If those sites weren’t protected, he said, many species dependent on native prairies would disappear.
"Noah Brown's Prairie itself, which the remnant prairie — there is only like 19 acres," he said, "but we have about 180 species of native plants there, but about over 40 of those are restricted to or considered remnant dependent species that they are basically restricted to pretty much undisturbed or remnant natural habitat."
Noah Brown's Prairie is actually 59 acres, but only 19 of those are undisturbed prairie land. MPF is reconstructing the 40 acres of non-prairie with seeds collected at the adjacent remnant and other nearby MPF prairies.
Schuette returned to the prairie remnant in June and observed and photographed a bee gathering pollen from fringed poppy mallow, according to the Missouri Prairie Foundation, and wondered if it might be the callirhoe bee, which is also an SOCC in Missouri. MPF said native bee expert Mike Arduser determined it was not the callirhoe bee but a male Diadasia afflicta, which is common in the Great Plains but has only been documented a handful of times in Missouri.
According to MPF, a critically imperiled species of moth, Dichagyris reliqua, has been documented at Noah Brown's Prairie. And scissor-tailed flycatchers, eastern kingbirds, grasshopper sparrows, and Bell’s vireos have been documented there.
