I've had this link open for the past week and I'm really enjoy zooming in and out a few times a day in an attempt to better perceive scale. It is so fun! https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0q4wEVr00VfDU2iz5F_-kexIV-IjOzC7LD1fb_alWYlt4xyhsJTJMQSjw_aem_CC3OIxFyuPoK_7dRrc0LbA (fb)

Here's a fun Naturecite project that I, Jacob Hadle, Dana Thomas, Jarran Tindle, and Nathan Aaron just completed in collaboration with the Kansas Forest Service utilizing photos primarily from Steve Turner and Jacob Hadle. The goal of this publication is to suggest 50 species of plants that a regular person could use to get a rough idea of how much functional dynamism has persisted in woodlands and forests in Kansas. No easy task for several reasons including, 1) eastern Kansas is the western edge of the Eastern Deciduous Forest biome and thus inherently lacks as much diversity as woodlands/forests to the east; 2) many of the woodlands/forest in Kansas are new colonizations into a wetter and more damaged landscape (undamaged systems are less prone to change/colonization, whether by native species or exotics); and 3) the difficulty of untangling what is a prairie remnant species and not also a woodland remnant indicator renders species like Leadplant (Amorpha canescens) ambiguous. Though this is a very simple and limited tool, we're particularly proud of the potential that scaling the Floristic Quality Assessment methodologies down to something that the average person can use to gain a glimpse of what ecological integrity means affords. With this sort of insight non-professionals may grow with the concept and learn the larger mechanisms of ecological dynamism. Ultimately, such cursory reviews of systems are not useful for meaningful conservation engagement and certainly never useful for "management" but it is a foot in the door to a concept that can literally be life-altering and life-affirming. (fb)