LAS vegas bearpoppy, a rare plant species largely restricted to gypsum soils, was recently petitioned for listing under the ESA

IT occurs sporadically across a large area of the eastern mojave desert in clark county, nevada and adjacent arizona. Management for its conservation would be greatly facilitated if its current status and trends and also its range-wide distribution could be better documented. This is difficult using traditional on-the-ground surveys because of its often very sparse distribution across large areas of potential habitat and also because of the fragile gypsum soil environment where IT is found. We have developed drone unmanned aerial vehicle -based methodology for accomplishing large-scale population census and monitoring for a closely related species dwarf bearpoppy, arctomecon humilis in a similar badlands habitat. We are currently extending this approach to census LAS vegas bearpoppy in the gold butte area of clark county. We propose to continue our census of LAS vegas bearpoppy in the bitter springs valley, white basin, rainbow gardens, and valley of fire state park areas of the county, where the poppies are known to occur but where large areas of potential habitat remain unsurveyed. We plan to drone-census at least 4,000 HA of potential habitat in these areas. Our census product will include count data for defined areas polygons of occupied habitat and also the location of each individual poppy on maps generated using arcpro GIS software. Our methodology includes the use of a deep learning artificial intelligence object detection program to quickly and accurately identify, geolocate, and count individual poppy plants in the drone imagery. We also propose to set up four 0.6 HA long-term monitoring plots at three populations in the gold butte area, three populations in the bitter springs valley area, and three populations in the rainbow gardens area. Gold butte populations will be monitored for three years, while bitter springs valley populations will be monitored for two years, and rainbow gardens populations will be monitored for one year. Our established methodology uses very high resolution drone imagery to geolocate, measure, and score flowering status for hundreds of individual poppies, all without any surface disturbance. These permanent plots can then be monitored yearly to follow population trends based on recruitment, growth, flowering, and mortality of individual plants. We will then provide training materials to allow land managers or their contractors to continue monitoring these plots in future years.