Floristic Quality Assessment#Coefficient of conservatism
{{short description|Ecological integrity assessment}}
Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) is a tool used in the United States to assess an area's ecological integrity based on its plant species composition. Floristic Quality Assessment was originally developed in order to assess the likelihood that impacts to an area "would be irreversible or irretrievable...to make standard comparisons among various open land areas, to set conservation priorities, and to monitor site management or restoration efforts." The concept was developed by Gerould Wilhelm in the 1970s in a report on the natural lands of Kane County, Illinois. In 1979 Wilhelm and Floyd Swink codified this "scoring system" {{cite book|last1=Young|first1=Dick|date=1994|title=Kane County Wild Plants And Natural Areas, 2nd edition|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31441931|page=4|publisher=Kane County Forest Preserve District|oclc=31441931 }}
Coefficient of conservatism
File:North American Regions with C-values for their flora.tif
Each plant species in a region is assigned a coefficient of conservatism, also known as a C-value, ranging between 0 and 10. A plant species with a higher score (e.g. 10) has a lower tolerance to environmental degradation such as overgrazing or development and therefore is naturally restricted to undisturbed, remnant habitats. Non-native plants are either assigned a C-value of 0 or are excluded from assessments. In the Chicago Region, 84% of the native plant species have a C-value of 4 or greater. Plants with a C-value of 4 or greater rarely naturally move from a remnant area to surrounding degraded land. For example, the federally endangered Dalea foliosa has a C-value of 10.{{cite web|url=http://peterchen.nicerweb.com/pix/PRAIRIE/|title=Russell R. Kirt Prairie Plant Gallery, College of DuPage|last1=Chen|first1=Peter}}
C-values are assigned within specific ecological and geographic regions by botanical experts familiar with the species' autecology within the respective regions. {{As of|February 2018}}, there were more than 50 different FQA databases ranging from the Gulf Coastal Plain to western Washington, though most databases represented regions in the eastern and central United States and Canada.{{cite web |url=http://universalfqa.org |title=Universal FQA|access-date=2018-02-16}}{{Cite journal|last=Spyreas|first=Greg|date=2019|title=Floristic Quality Assessment: a critique, a defense, and a primer|journal=Ecosphere|language=en|volume=10|issue=8|pages=e02825|doi=10.1002/ecs2.2825|bibcode=2019Ecosp..10E2825S |issn=2150-8925|doi-access=free}}
The mean C-value () is calculated based on an inventory of plants. An area with a native mean C-value of 3.5 or higher likely has "sufficient floristic quality to be of at least marginal natural area quality." Remnant natural areas with mean C-values of 4.0 or greater are unmitigable.
Floristic Quality Index
The Floristic Quality Index (FQI, or Rating Index according to Swink and Wilhelm{{rp|855}}) is calculated by multiplying the mean C value by the square root of the total number of species:
For example, the FQI for [https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/INPC/Pages/Area2KaneNelsonLakeMarsh.aspx Nelson Lake Marsh] was 78 in 1994 {{rp|186}} and that for Russell R. Kirt Prairie was about 30 in 1999.{{cite journal|last1=Kirt|first1=Russell R.|editor1-last=Bernstein|editor1-first=Neil P.|editor2-last=Ostrander|editor2-first=Laura J.|date=2001|title=A Sixteen Year Assessment of Vegetational Changes in Prairie Seed Broadcast and Seedling Transplant Sites|url=https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/EcoNatRes/EcoNatRes-idx?type=article&id=EcoNatRes.NAPC17&did=EcoNatRes.NAPC17.RKirt|journal=Proceedings of the Seventeenth North American Prairie Conference|pages=98–106|publisher=University of Wisconsin Digital Collections}}
References
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