Site Assessment & FQA — Floristic Quality Assessment
Site Assessments
Site Assessment is a specialty of CRI. Dr. Gerould Wilhelm and his associates are expert at recognizing flora and fauna on any given site, evaluating the ecological and cultural significance, and advising landowners how to go forward with conservation and/or development projects.
This page from an assessment of the Bryant Property in Waukesha, Wisconsin is an example of this type of work:
FQA — Floristic Quality Assessment
Floristic Quality Assessment, a vegetation-based ecological assessment protocol, was introduced by Gerould Wilhelm in 1977 and applied in a pilot study that assessed the natural areas of Kane County, Illinois, which is available on this page. It was applied for the 22-county Chicago region as a whole in 1979 by F. Swink and G. Wilhelm in their book, Plants of the Chicago Region, published by the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois. Wilhelm & Ladd expanded the explanation in 1988 in the Transactions of the 53rd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. Since then, it has been applied fully to numerous others states and regions, which include 33 states and 2 provinces.
Some state programs are included in a treatment for Mid-Atlantic States and the Northeast Regional Floristic Quality Assessments. A number of these assessments are included on this web page. To access an FQA Universal Calculator, go to this website:
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/water/floristic-quality-assessment
Downloadable from this page:
First Quality Assessments Applications
States and Provinces where FQA has been applied:
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Ontario
Pennsylvania
South Dakota
South Florida
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin