An unOfficial Website of the Commonwealth of Kentucky
The Kentucky Biodiversity Project, coordinated through Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves , is the state's premier source for the most up to date information concerning Kentucky's rare plants, animals, and natural communities. The project started in 2018 and hopes to grow this website as a valuable resource so citizens and scientists alike can view, obtain, and contribute information about Kentucky's wonderful biodiversity. Kentucky Nature Preserves participates in a hemisphere wide network of heritage programs that use an advanced spatial database to catalog and track species, communities, natural and managed areas, and conservation sites.
This quad heat maps represents the distribution of the biodiversity of Kentucky's rare plants, animals and natural communities. In addition, data is depicted to reflect current and historical/extirpated records* (see below for term definitions). Feel free to toggle between the different record types and the EO Group selector.
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Historical records - core heritage methodology defines
historical as records that lack observation or data maintenance greater than 20 years. This does not exclude
the continued existence. As such, the historical component of this map serves to inform observers of potential
places to investigate or search for rare species.
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Element Occurrences - an
element is the concept of intertwining several systems to identify, classify, and name a species or community.
An
occurrence is the record of an element existence, including its location and other attributes. Unlike species lists, element
occurrences are tracked and recorded over time
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Natural Communities - a
natural community is an exemplary occurrence of an ecological community that is relatively undisturbed or
may have recovered sufficiently from previous disturbances and have the flora and fauna that represents the ecological
communities that existed at the time of European colonization.
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Extirpated - an element determined to no longer occurr at that location.
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Extant - an element with a confirmed presence.