The Northern Neck Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society is delighted to be presenting a free Zoom program entitled “Virginia’s Native Flora – Latest and Greatest Botanical Finds” on Thursday, February 20th, 7:00 pm.
The speaker will be Johnny Townsend, Senior Botanist with Virginia Natural Heritage Program, a division within Virginia’s Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). This program is free and accessible by computer or smart phone.
Johnny is an amazing field botanist, and his knowledge of Virginia’s native flora and ecological communities is unparalleled. Growing up in the South Carolina Lowcountry he was a nature boy at a young age with a love of plants, birds and fish.” After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Forest Management in 1992 he went on for a master’s degree in Botany, also from Clemson. After working at Clemson for a few years as a field botanist, he was offered a botanist position in 2001 with the Virginia Natural Heritage Program and has been there ever since. As Senior Botanist, he works throughout the Commonwealth, focusing particularly on rare plant species and their habitats but also on studying more about all of the state’s native and exotic plants.
In 2012 the manual “Flora of Virginia” was published - the first “complete” Virginia flora in over 250 years and Townsend was a co-author on that 10-year project. That manual is now a fabulous, information-filled smart phone app for identification of all Virginia plants. When not running around in the field, he helps maintain the “Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora”, an ongoing effort to track the county-level distribution of all plants in the state. His appreciation for nature began as a youngster, and continues with birds and fish, not just plants.
The Virginia Natural Heritage began in 1986 with the Commonwealth entering into a cooperative agreement with The Nature Conservancy. Their goal was to develop a comprehensive approach for conserving Virginia’s rare plant and animal populations, and natural communities. In 1989, the General Assembly passed the “Virginia Natural Area Preserve Act” which charged DCR (and Natural Heritage) with the responsibilities of conserving the biological diversity of Virginia, inventorying natural heritage resources, maintaining a data bank of the information gathered through this inventory, and establishing a system of preserves dedicated to protecting natural heritage resources. There are 66 Preserves in Virginia, four in the Northern Neck.
