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Workshop

Public-Private Sector

WK 18 - New Developments in the Application of the Floristic Quality Assessment Index (FQA) and Interactive Demonstration of a New FQA Calculator for R

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM PDT
Location: 257

    Organizer(s)

  • BH

    Brook D. Herman

    Research Ecologist
    USACE-Engineer Research and Development Center
    Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States

    • Co-organizer(s)

  • IF

    Iris Foxfoot

    Bowhead Contractor, United States

  • JB

    Jason Bried

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States

    • Co-Organizer(s)

  • RS

    Robbie Sliwinski

    Botanist
    USACE-Chicago District

    • Speaker(s)

  • JZ

    Jack Zinnen

    Illinois Natural History Survey, University of IL at Champaign-Urbana, United States

  • MF

    Matthew Finzel

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States

  • SJ

    Suneeti Jog

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States

  • JM

    Jesse E. D Miller

    University of CA at Davis
    Stanford, California, United States

Session Description: Rapidly assessing and communicating the status or condition of a natural area can be challenging. The Floristic Quality Assessment Index (FQA) provides a standardized way to rapidly assess the condition of a vegetated area based on the plant species that are present. Each plant species in an area of concern is assigned a numerical value (0 to 10), called a Coefficient of Conservatism (C Value) reflective of the plant species’ response to human activities and level of habitat specialization. Generally, C values are assigned by a group of regional experts, resulting in numerous regional FQA lists of flora and their associated C Values covering various geographic areas, such as states, biomes or geologic features. Like other rapid assessment methodologies, the FQA has pros and cons and understanding these are key to the appropriate application of the FQA. This interactive workshop will review the history of the FQA, applications and its pros and cons, followed by research into new directions of adapting the framework of the FQA using species traits, indicator species, and non-vascular/cryptic species to calculate FQA metrics. The workshop will include an interactive demonstration of the new Floristic Quality Assessment Calculator for R (fqacalc) and web app, developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. R package is available online at https://github.com/ifoxfoot/fqacalc. To fully participate, attendees should have R or RStudio installed on their computer, and have some familiarity with using R. We will guide attendees through installing our R package.