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Join us for our 2025 PNPS Annual Meeting Shaver's Creek Environmental Center in Petersburg, PA!8:00 - 9:30 AM: Optional pre-meeting walks, choose one:
- Bird Walk, Doug Wentzel, Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. Meet at the Outdoor Classroom at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center (no participant limit)
- Forest Therapy Walk, Merrill David, Rooted Heart Forest Therapy. Meet at Lake Perez Boat Launch. (Limited to 12 participants). Before our PNPS meeting begins, start your day in a mindful way and renew your relationship with the earth. Merrill David (@RootedHeartForestTherapy) will guide participants through a series of peaceful sensory invitations -- to engage with nature, open the senses, and begin the day feeling present and refreshed. Merrill is a certified forest therapy guide, a PA Master Naturalist, and a PA Native Plant Society board member. With over 30 years of experience in teaching and educational programming for all ages, she leads gentle guided experiences that invite relaxation, mindfulness, and connection with the natural and more-than-human world -- helping people reconnect with nature while reconnecting with themselves. .
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM: Registration and plant sale opens; Grant Awardee videos on display
10:00 - 10:15 AM: Welcome, Business meeting, Budget
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10:15 - 11:00 AM Backyard conserve: How plant species and garden design impact monarch survival, Sophia Mucciolo, Penn State University
Bio: Sophia is an Ecology PhD student at Penn State. She grew up in central Pennsylvania, where she developed a passion for nature and conservation. This passion led her to Penn State for both undergraduate and graduate school. Her interests include studying ecological interactions in human-impacted environments and how we can make conservation strategies more efficient. She currently studies monarch butterfly populations, primarily in backyard gardens.
Description: Monarch populations have heavily declined in recent decades, sparking a conservation movement. Many public and private land managers create habitat by planting milkweed, the monarchs’ host plant. Beyond just planting milkweed, land managers make many decisions that might impact monarch populations. There are many native milkweed species in the United States, which have different benefits to monarchs. There are also other aspects of habitat design that could be important, such as habitat patch size, plant diversity, and plant nativeness. In this talk, Sophia will talk about how milkweed species and other aspects of garden design can influence monarch survival. With this information, we may be able to make changes to backyard gardens that maximize monarch conservation potential.
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11:15 - 12:00 PM: Protecting and Stewarding Pennsylvania’s Endangered Species: Plant Conservation Efforts on State Forest Lands, Cheyenne Moore, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Forestry
Bio: Cheyenne Moore is the Pennsylvania Plant Conservation Alliance Coordinator. Cheyenne grew up in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania where she developed an appreciation for the natural world. After earning a B.S. in Biology from Dickinson College, Cheyenne received her M.S. in Biology from Bucknell University where she worked on conservation and genetics of Pennsylvania’s threatened, rare, and endangered plant taxa. After working on invasive species ecology with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and University of Pittsburgh, she accepted her current position as PPCA Coordinator with the PA Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources and the PA Natural Heritage Program. In this role she facilitates the conservation of Pennsylvania’s globally rare, threatened, and endangered plants.
Description: Many know that the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources manages 2.2 million acres of State Forest Land through the DCNR Bureau of Forestry, but did you know that DCNR is the jurisdictional agency for plants? While some may think the Bureau of Forestry only works with trees, DCNR BOF also works to steward and conserve rare, threatened, and endangered plants in our state forests (and beyond!). This talk will detail some of the plant conservation work happening in our Pennsylvania state forests.
12:00 - 1:00 PM Lunch (bring your own) and plant sale
1:00 - 1:30 PM Grant Awardees
1:30 - 3:00 PM Plant ID Walk and plant sale
Registration link here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdeSwOliAeScZHTEKW1t35zBPDZGXVu0sMIc8i3MQkkSy6cjw/viewform
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Shaver's Creek Environmental Center, 3400 Discovery Rd, Petersburg, PA 16669-2114, United States, Pine Grove Mills
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.