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About

The purpose of this website is to educate people about the most common grasses and grass-like plants in the state of Idaho. The website is also available to promote high-quality visual tools and educational materials such as A Field Guide to Grasses and Grass-like Plants of Idaho, the Idaho Grasses & Grass-like Plants app, and the 9th-12th grade educational curriculum.

Since grasses are not easily identified, these components were developed for the state of Idaho, specifically designed to meet the needs of those with limited background to advanced botany skills. Below are more in-depth descriptions about the field guide, smartphone app, and educational curriculum.

Field Guide

A Field Guide to Grasses and Grass-like Plants of Idaho is a user-friendly field guide intended for K-16 educators and students, ranchers, land managers, field technicians, recreationists, and nature enthusiasts.

Nearly 400 color images illustrate detailed vegetative and reproductive features of 89 grasses and grass-like plants found in Idaho. This guide also includes easy-to-use dichotomous keys, plus information on each plant’s forage value and importance of wildlife cover, erosion control, and use in restoration projects. Comparisons to similar species, synonyms, flowering periods, distribution maps, and black-and-white illustrations are included to aid in identification.

This field guide includes maps of Idaho's vegetation regions and topography, and an easy-to-read county map. Handy features make the guide easy to use in the field: a ruler on each plant description page to measure specific plant parts, colored tabs delineating grass tribes and grass-like plant families, and an extensive glossary and index.

A Field Guide to Grasses and Grass-like Plants of Idaho is an invaluable resource for readers learning about the unique characteristics and the value of some of the most ubiquitous and important plant families living in the vast landscapes of Idaho.

Click here to place an order online or call 208-885-7982 to order a copy by phone.

Smartphone App

The Idaho Grasses & Grass-like Plants app includes most of the information as the field guide. However, it does not include the user-friendly dichotomous keys, but contains an easy-to-use filter to help users narrow down their search for grass and grass-like plant species.

The Idaho Grasses & Grass-like Plants app is available for smartphone and tablet devices that run on either iOS or Android operating systems. This state-of-the-art offline resource can be purchased at the App Store and Google Play.

Click here to view the app on the App Store.

Click here to view the app on Google Play.

Educational Curriculum

To help educators and students understand the importance of, and differences among, grasses and grass-like plant species, a 9th-12th grade curriculum for a 5-day summer camp was developed. To complement the 9th-12th grade curriculum, a field journal was created to help students: take notes; draw pictures of different vegetative and reproductive features; understand how to use a dichotomous key; learn how to properly identify soils by using a “Soil Texture By Feel” flowchart; and, know how to properly fill out information for a site description.

Many of the ideas for the curriculum came from the book Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggens and Jay McTighe, which was crafted to help K-16 educators design curricular assessments and instructions. The curriculum also followed the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Although the 9th-12th grade curriculum is structured on a 5-day summer camp schedule, pieces and sections of the curriculum can be extracted to fit the needs of other educators’ teaching methods and time constraints. With this kind of flexibility, teachers can focus on a single lesson plan or a combination of lesson plans to help their students learn about the grasses and grass-like plants of Idaho.

Click here to download the 9th-12th grade educational curriculum and the field journal.