1001 W CASINO RD BASE FILE 2018-01-01 MF Import

15 Plant Community D��aription ana Clas�ificatioa M�thoa� The plant communities on the property were descr.ibed and classified lnto veqetation cover types usinq the Braun- Blanquet cover-abundance mathod (Table A.1) (Mueller-Domboie and Ellenberg 1974) . Plant species composition and cover- abundance were noted within homoqeneous cover types and recorded accordinq to the Braun-Slanquet Aethodology ("plotless method") . The scientific and common nomenclature of all plant spacies encountered followa Hitchcock and Cronquist (1973) , and with each species beinq assigned a wetland indicator status (WIS) (Reed 1988) . The WiS ratinqs segregate species into "ecological qroups" with similar probabilities of occurrence in wetlands, or abilities to withstand saturated soil conditions (Table A.2) . A list of the plants found on the property, alonq with their acientific and common namea, and Wis assiqnments is located in Table B.1. The plant community descriptions satisfy the federal technical quideline for the identification of predominant veqetation. Twe quantitative indices vere us�d to simplify t.he task of analyzing the vegetation data and to classify the plent communities as either wetland and upland. The first index calculated was the percentaqe of dominant speciea with a WIS ratinq of facultative or wetter. For our calculations, a cover c1asE value of 2 (5-25 3 cover-nbundance) in the Braun-Blanquet scale was used as the lower limit for the dominant veqetation. For each plot the percentage of species that were facultativa or wetter, for all species with a cover value of 2 or qreater, was calculated. An example of this calculation is providad below. The second veqetation index calculated for each plot was a weiqh�ed mean of the WIS ratinqs. Thia weighted mean index (WMI) , averagea the Wis of all species in the plot by weiqhtinq each of the epecies encountered, based upon their relative cover-abundance in the community. The WMI providea a measure of the adaptation of the plant community ko saturated soil conditions and follows the recommendations of � Wentworth and Johnson (1986) and ths Federal Manual for identifying and Delineatinq Jurisdictional Wetlands (Federal Znteraqency Committee for Wetland Delineation 1989) . The calculation of a WMI involves taking the sum of the products of WIS and dominance valuas for all epecias in a given plot, and dividing this by the sum of all dominance values (See the example below) . To accompliah this, WIS ratings were asaigned numerical values (Table A.3) and the dominan�e values were calculatad as the percentaqe midpoints of the Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance classes (Table A.4) . ThP plus or minus siqns assigned by Reed (1988) are iqnored