Bonhoeffer Gardens and WWU have invited the 1,500 members of the Washington Native Plant Society to assist and mentor students who were overtaxed visiting and establishing herbaria and monitoring sites in 2018.  The question posed was, “Do 455 native plant species still exist?”  2019’s question is now, “Do 266 taxa exist?”

A 2nd 2019 question also exists, and it is a matter of numbers:  if Cascadia below 3,500′ holds ~900 native plant species and you added the high alpine and Eastern Washington (WNPS Chapters) to have ~2,000 native taxa … and since plants do not know state boundaries and if you included the Rocky Mountain Floristic Region (of which Cascadia/Vancouverian is a subset), is the estimate of ~3,500 unique taxa total that daunting?  Should we be discussing increasing the SAM Project by the factor (only) of 4x?