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. The National
Plant Data Team 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.
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