The Flora of Washington

Washington’s vascular plant diversity mirrors the ecological heterogeneity of the state, from the towering conifers of the Olympic peninsula to diminutive wildflowers and bunchgrasses of the high desert. This field-based course will focus on learning to identify Washington plants and understanding how their distribution and ecology reflecting the state’s varying environments. We will emphasize characteristics for field identification, and we will use dichotomous keys to identify plants in the laboratory. Learning to recognize plant families will be presented as a central framework for the class. We will take one-day (not overnight) field trips, and regional botanists will make guest appearances to help us understand the flora of Washington.

Graduate students can receive graduate credit for the course by completing an additional annotated bibliography assignment.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

4 - Botany in the Pacific Northwest