Annual detection of all stems of Asclepias meadii (Mead?s milkweed) at the Rockefeller Prairie (KS) 1992-2006.

These data were used in a publication by Moore et al. (in press, as of 2011; citation as follows: Clinton T. Moore, Christopher J. Fonnesbeck, Katriona Shea, Kristopher J. Lah, Paul M. McKenzie, Lianne C. Ball, Michael C. Runge and ,Helen M. Alexander. (2011). An adaptive decision framework for the conservation of a threatened plant. Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management. In press.)
The following description is modified from the Moore et al. (2011) abstract: Mead's milkweed (Asclepias meadii), a long-lived perennial herb of tallgrass prairie and glade communities of the central United States, is a species designated as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Challenges to its successful management include the facts that much about its life history is unknown, its age at reproductive maturity is very advanced, certain life stages are practically unobservable, its productivity is responsive to unpredictable environmental events, and most of the known populations occur on private lands unprotected by any legal conservation instrument. To aid in its management, Moore et al. developed a prototype population-level state-dependent decision-making framework that explicitly accounts for this uncertainty and for uncertainties related to stochastic environmental effects and vital rates. To parameterize the decision model, they used estimates found in the literature, and analyzed data from a long-term monitoring program where fates of individual plants were observed through time (the data archived here).