Brown Bag Talks

This project examines the developmental changes occurring in wildflowers at Cooper Mountain Nature Park. The goal is to successfully implement a program to monitor and collect rare wild flowers for the Metro Native Plant Center. The project began as our Americorps Community Action Project, CAP, through NWSA. Our “Bloomtime Project” aids in the Native Plant Center’s vital seed saving and amplification process by tracking the phenological developments for native flowers at Cooper Mountain. We tracked changes in phenological events involving plant flowering; with observations of interest ranging from first bud, flowering, seed formation, to seed dispersal. We created a straightforward data collection formula with codes assigned to each species, site, and phenological state. Cooper Mountain is a unique habitat with Oregon White Oak savannas and open prairies that have been relatively undisturbed for hundreds of years.