shortly acute vs. sharply acute or acuminate) and sepal nervature 

 (absent vs. broadly 1-nerved) . In addition, the habitat 

 description, "Douglas Fir climax", is in marked contrast to its 

 dry Aqropyron spicatum habitat as it is found elsewhere in 

 Montana. This specimen is the only Montana collection for this 

 species outside of Beaverhead County. The task of seeking an 

 annotation will be pursued by the Montana Natural Heritage 

 Program with the help of the Montana State University Herbarium. 



A refined target list of rare plants on the Helena National 

 Forest was also developed as a result of 1992 fieldwork (Appendix 

 4) . Initially a preliminary list of 48 plants of special concern 

 within the study area (Appendix 2) was compiled from a Forest 

 Service Biological Evaluation (U.S. Forest Service 1992a) and 

 information from the Montana Natural Heritage Program database. 

 After examination of habitats within the study area and 

 discussion with knowledgeable individuals, several species were 

 deleted from the list of possibilities because the probabilty of 

 finding suitable habitat was low (Appendix 3) . The remaining 26 

 species (Appendix 4) form a more realistic list of plants of 

 special concern which do occur in the Big Belt and Elkhorn 

 Mountains or which have a high probability of occurring there. 

 Appendix 4 also contains the status of these species on a global, 

 state, and forest level as well as a habitat profile for each 

 species and a confidence level for both the habitat profile and 

 the probability of those species being present. For the 

 suspected species, the ones of highest concern and which should 

 receive the highest priority for survey, are noted. 



A secondary product of the sensitive species survey fieldwork is 

 the compilation of floras for the Big Belt Mountains with 694 

 species (Appendix 6) and the Elkhorn Mountains with 382 species 

 (Appendix 7) . 



