Plants of Palisades State Park and Devils Gulch

Plants of Palisades State Park and Devils Gulch near Garretson South Dakota

Palisades State Park and Devil’s Gulch Park are both situated in Sioux Quartzite rock outcrops. These outcrops offer unique habitats for plants. Some of the plants on this list are only found on Sioux Quartzite.

The list of plants was generated from two sources.  One being herbarium collections of plants and the other being observations of plants. Only plants identified to species or lower are included.

The first source is the Great Plains Region Herbarium Network accessed at NGPHerbaria.org. It is a data portal that allows queries of herbaria. Herbaria contain mostly pressed and dried vouchers of plants. The query for the data is State equal “South Dakota”, county equal “Minnehaha” and locality equal “Garretson”. This gets any collection recorded with a locality of Garretson which is the town near both sites.

The second source is Inaturalist accessed at inaturalist.org. Inaturalist is a database containing observations of plants and other biological organisms. The data was accessed using a circular boundary that encompassed both sites. Only “research grade” records are included.  To be a research grade plant observation at species level or lower the following criteria must be met.

  • It has a date
  • It is georeferenced
  • It has photos
  • It isn’t of a captive or cultivated organism
  • More than 2/3 of identifiers are in agreement of the species identification

List of Plants

This plant list was generated on May 28, 2025. It does not include anything added after this date.  I highly recommend submitting observations to iNaturalist. Periodically I will update the list.

Plants of Palisades State Park and Devil’s Gulch Park near Garretson South Dakota

Definitions of Kinds of Plants

South Dakota Great Backyard Bird Count 2025

On February 14, 15, 16, 17 people used Ebird to submit bird counts in the state for the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC).

This is the 2025 GBBC Summary for South Dakota. From this link you can click on a county to see what was seen in that county but I’ve included links to counties in the Mitchell Area. You may want to join the Mitchell Area Birders Group on Facebook.

To participate use the Ebird app or the Ebird website to submit counts.

You can use the Ebird mobile app for Android or Apple or you can use the Ebird website.

Mitchell Area

The following links will take you to results for counties in the Mitchell Area.

Aurora County
Davison County
Douglas County
Hanson County
Hutchinson County
Jerauld County
McCook County
Miner County
Sanborn County

Mussels of ND, SD, NE, KS, MN, IA, MO

I use iNaturalist to document mussels that I find and so do countless others. iNaturalist is an app for your smartphone but its also a website. Visit iNaturalist. All links in this post take you to iNaturalist mussel projects. The mussel projects are defined to include mussels for each state. Furthermore you can look at the Project Journals for news about the project you are viewing.

Mussels are not well documented. But its not super difficult to photograph them and submit them to iNaturalist. Most mussels you find will be out of the water and will not be alive. I recommend 3 images for these shells. One of outside, one of the inside, and one of the hinge side. To help spread the word about mussels I created 7 project for states in the center of the country. I listed the states from north to south, west to east. I hope you will join any projects for states you live in or near and submit observations of mussels.

Western Column of States

North Dakota

South Dakota

Nebraska

Kansas

Eastern Column of States

Minnesota

Iowa

Missouri