Gary Fleming to speak at the November Meeting of the John Clayton Chapter
From the Atlantic coast to the spruce-fir forests at more than 5,700 feet elevation on Mount Rogers, the landscape of Virginia encompasses an extraordinary range of landforms, topography, and biological habitats. In this presentation, “The Ecological Regions and Natural Communities of Virginia”, Gary P. Fleming will explore the large-scale environmental and biotic gradients that influence Virginia, and present an overview of the natural features and communities in each of five physiographic provinces that intersect the state. The status of natural area protection in these regions, as well as some of the management issues that natural area land managers deal with regularly, will also be addressed.
Gary P. Fleming is a senior vegetation ecologist at the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Natural Heritage Program with more than 35 years of experience in botanical and ecological inventory of natural areas in the mid-Atlantic region. Since joining the Natural Heritage Program in 1992, Mr. Fleming and his colleagues have been responsible for field inventory of natural communities in all regions of Virginia and the development of a state-wide vegetation classification based on quantitative data from more than 4700 plot samples
Mr. Fleming was a contributing writer for the recently published Flora of Virginia, producing two introductory chapters and all the habitat information in the species accounts. He is also a long-time member and current President of the Virginia Botanical Associates, and a co-author of that group’s Atlas of the Virginia Flora III (1992) and current on-line Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora.
In 2011, he and two collaborators described a new species of hedgenettle (Stachys, Lamiaceae) endemic to southern Virginia and North Carolina, which was published in the Journal of Botanical Research Institute Texas (5:9-18). Additional studies by Mr. Fleming and his colleagues has been published in Castanea, Banisteria, the Virginia Journal of Science, and other scientific journals.
This talk is sponsored by the John Clayton Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society.