From the Editor

Last week I attended the Native Plant Summit in Boise, Idaho, sponsored by the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the Boise State University Department of Biology. The purpose of the Summit was to allow stewards of public lands to share ideas about best practices for wildland reclamation and habitat development. Speakers at the meeting shared topics covering a wide range of subject matter, including but not limited to, impacts of global warming, creation of efficacious seed collection zones, improving revegetation protocols for arid regions, managing noxious weeds during native plant establishment, providing descriptions of native plants that create effective fire breaks, and identifying physiological traits to improve the competitiveness of native species used in reclamation projects. I was among the last three speakers of the conference. Rather than extending the predominant themes of the Summit, each of the three of us presented on a topic related to producing native plant habitat in urban home and commercial landscapes. Although our presentations were very well-received, each of the three of us expressed feelings of being out of place in a conference dedicated largely to management of wildlands. In retrospect, I have convinced myself our perceived displacement was largely personal perception. We simply represented an element of valuable reclamation and habitat development that is urgently needed in the face of burgeoning urban sprawl. A few years ago, when Kas Dumroese approached me requesting service as Editor-in-Chief of the Native Plants Journal, my willingness to accept a new and complex set of duties was based on the Journal’s mission to serve practitioners working in a broad scope of native plant deployment. This extensive mission is still honored and, in my mind, makes the journal an ideal place to publish native plant work that will effectively reach our like-minded colleagues.