About Fact Sheets & Plant Guides

These documents provide information about conservation plants that are commonly used to improve the land or are useful in other ways. Many are important for plant community restoration, or are used in various conservation activities such as creating buffers, growing windbreaks, stabilizing soil, reclaiming old mines, and providing habitat for wildlife. Others are of great cultural significance to Native Americans, are commonly used in landscapes, or provide valuable forage for livestock. Some are noxious weeds.

Fact Sheets

Fact Sheets provide brief descriptions of a plant and its uses, and offer cultural recommendations. Plant Materials staff prepared most of our Fact Sheets.

Plant Guides

Plant Guides are similar to Fact Sheets but are usually more extensive and more narrative, and are typically referenced to source documents. Although many Plant Guides emphasize a particular aspect of a plant’s biology—perhaps its cultural significance or weediness—we are not distinguishing these various types here. Staff at the National Plant Data Center prepared most of our Plant Guides, though many have been written by other partners within NRCS or at other institutions such as the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.

Fact Sheets and Plant Guides can be profitably used with other tools that are available through PLANTS, especially VegSpec. VegSpec lets you select plants based on geography, a plant’s adaptability to soils and climate, an intended conservation use, and other variables. After looking at a preliminary list generated by VegSpec you can use the Fact Sheet or Plant Guide to learn more about each plant and its suitability for your purpose. You can use a combination of the Plant Characteristics available through PLANTS and these Fact Sheets and/or Plant Guides together as well. We encourage NRCS Field Offices to use our Web information and these documents to develop locally-oriented Fact Sheets or Plant Guides.

We continue to write new Fact Sheets and Plant Guides, and welcome your ideas on sources of information. If you can provide comparable documents that we could adapt and post at PLANTS we would much appreciate it; we at NRCS welcome new partners of all kinds. If you are interested, please consult the Plant Fact Sheet Coordination Page.