
In the early 1990s, Gayle Tonkovich and Malcolm Sargent from the University of Illinois conducted vascular plant surveys at Fall Creek Gorge Nature Preserve, publishing “The Vascular Plants of Fall Creek Gorge Nature Preserve, Warren County, Indiana” in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science in 1993. During their work they described the habitats at the 160+ acre preserve with detailed maps and vouchered 351 species.
Since then, 30 years have passed and the preserve has seen significant changes. NICHES Land Trust is working with Rich Hull of Indiana University, as part of a multiyear project to create fully vouchered plant lists for 11 NICHES sites in the lower Wabash Valley including Fall Creek Gorge.
In 2023, NICHES was awarded a grant through the Indiana Academy of Science and Indiana Land Protection Alliance to hire Nathanael Pilla with Midwest Biological Survey to supplement Rich’s efforts at Fall Creek Gorge and complete a paper following Tonkovich and Sargent.
Rich and Nathanael have already collected and vouchered 340 species from Fall Creek Gorge as of June, with a special focus on grass and sedge species and some of the more difficult to identify genus. These groups of taxa were not documented well in the 1993 project and bolstering efforts on these species will give us a much better view of the flora at the preserve and a new baseline to compare to as we move forward with active stewardship of the preserve. Vouchered checklists are the gold standard for species documentation and since NICHES is managing several other properties in the Big Pine Valley with significant habitat and species overlap with Fall Creek Gorge, this work will inform management beyond the preserve.
In 2023, ILPA partnered with the Indiana Academy of Science to provide small grants that supported four bioinventory projects in Northwest, Central, and Southern Indiana.