species listings or data reports from the Annotated National 

 Wetland Plant Species Data Base can be obtained from the National 

 Wetlands Inventory, St. Petersburg, Florida. 



The Soil Conservation Service, through a contract to the 

 Smithsonian Institution, produced a revised National List of 

 Scientific Plant Names in 1982 (U.S. Department of Agriculture 

 1982.) This national treatment provided a standard nomenclature 

 for the National List of Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands, 

 supplied a listing of synonyms linked to the accepted names, and 

 updated the regional distribution of each species. The Soil 

 Conservation Service list was selected as the taxonomic standard 

 in order to facilitate the eventual correlation of the National 

 List of Plant Species That Occur in Wetlands with the Hydric Soils 

 of the United States (U.S. Department of Agriculture 1987) . Copies 

 of the National List of Scientific Plant Names (1982) are available 

 from the State offices of the Soil Conservation Service. 



A wetland fidelity rating system was created during the initial 

 development of the Annotated National Wetland Plant Species Data 

 Base. Early coding of verbatim habitat from the botanical manuals 

 for a wide variety of plant species indicated that an obvious 

 separation of obligate (restricted to wetlands) and facultative 

 (not restricted to wetlands) species could be made. Further 

 refinement led to subdivision of the facultative category into 

 three subcategories, with a range of percent occurrences in wetland 

 versus nonwetland applied to each subcategory to enhance user 

 understanding and consistent application. 



The ecological information obtained from the botanical manuals 

 during data collection for the development of the Annotated 

 National Wetland Plant Species Data Base led to the identification 

 and addition to the National List of many additional species for 

 which at least one manual reported the species occurring in an 

 obvious wetland site. The National List had increased as a result 

 of this process to 5,244 species in 1982, 6,042 species in 1986, 

 and presently is composed of 6,728 plant species. 



