National Wetlands Inventory

The Fish and Wildlife Service has prepared a National List of Vascular Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands: 1996 National Summary (1996 National List). The 1996 National List is a draft revision of the National List of Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands: 1988 National Summary. The 1996 National List is provided to encourage additional public review and comments on the draft regional wetland indicator assignments. For more information, please read the Introduction to the 1996 National List that references Regional and Subregional subdivisions. See the suggested Review Procedure for guidelines on the development of review submissions.

The Introduction, 1996 National Summary and the 1996 Synonymy are available for viewing / downloading. These files are available in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), for publishing on the World Wide Web. If you do not currently have an Adobe(r) Acrobat Reader (version 2.0 or higher), you must download a copy (free), and install it on your computer prior to viewing the files. Once you install your viewer, you may click on the files listed below.

The 1996 National Summary and the 1996 Synonymy are also available in ASCII TEXT format for easier viewing on any World Wide Web browser that supports the HTML 2.0 standard. Both Netscape, version 2.0 or higher, and MS Internet Explorer (free), version 2.0 or higher, support it. To view these files, you do not need a PDF viewer (Adobe(r) Acrobat Reader). Please note that printing from these files will not reproduce the same format delivered with the original document. Both files (text version) are also available in compressed ZIP format.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has prepared a National List of Vascular Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands: 1998 National List. This revision is currently undergoing administrative review by the Fish and Wildlife Service. When it is approved for official release, the Service will make it available here in both readable document form and export files suitable for downloading.

• Errata to 1996 National List of Vascular Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands.

• Acknowledgments recognizes the many people that have contributed to the 1996 National List.

• The taxonomic and distributional data presented in the 1996 National List are held under copyright by Dr. John T. Kartesz.

BACKGROUND

In 1977, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began the development of a national list of vascular plant species that occur in wetlands as an appendix to the Classification of Wetlands and Deepwater Habitats of the United States (Cowardin et al. 1979).

Development of the National List became a cooperative federal endeavor in 1983, with the participation of the Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in National and Regional Interagency Review Panels.

In 1986, the Service published the first National and Regional Lists of Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands and produced in 1988 a revised version in National, Regional, and State List formats.

The 1988 National List is used primarily to identify and delineate the vegetative component for jurisdictional wetlands delineation conducted under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and the Food Security Act of 1985, as amended.

The revised 1998 National List is based on a 1994 checklist of the national flora (Kartesz 1994) and incorporates numerous changes from the 1988 National List resulting from new taxonomic, geographic, and ecological information.

The revised 1998 National List incorporates for the first time wetland indicator assignments in 13 sub-regional units based upon a hierarchical system of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. This has enabled the more precise assignment of wetland indicators for 211 taxa to more locally defined areas.

Copyright Notice

The 1996 National List of Vascular Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands incorporates a large amount of data on accepted and synonym names and state geographic data provided by Dr. John T. Kartesz, director of the Biota of North America Program (BONAP). The free reproduction and distribution of these data for personal and professional uses are encouraged. The ownership and copyright of these data for commercial purposes however remain the sole right of BONAP. The commercial use and sale of these data, in whole or in part, in any form without the expressed prior written permission of Dr. Kartesz is prohibited.