"Wild" vs. "planted" vs. "naturalized"

[pfau_tarleton]

@mollymjacobson

I do grapple with all of this! What difficulties arise in assigning conservation status, or even determining ranges, of plants when it may no longer be easy to tell where a plant ‘originally’ grew in a region, with so many populations originating, at some point, from planted individuals?

It’s a fascinating question. If a plant has not been documented to occur in a particular county, but it has been documented in a county, say, to the west, and then someone seeds a field in which that plant becomes established as a reproducing population, does that become a new county record and range extension. I’d have to say, yes! There are many historical instances of this sort of thing and we see those newer locations as part of the current distribution of the plant in published range maps. Often times, it’s not documented that such plantings took place so it’s impossible to tell if the range extension is human-mediated or not.