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 three sources. One being herbarium collections of vascular plants, one being herbarium collections of bryophytes and one being observations of plants. Only plants identified to species or lower are included.
The first 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 polygon 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
The second 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 “Devil;Devils;Gulch;Palisade;Palisades;Garretson;Split”. This gets any collection recorded with a locality that contains any of the words listed. Furthermore if there are GPS coordinates of the collection and it falls within the bounding polygon used for the iNaturalist place, they are also included.
The third source is the Consortium of Bryophyte Herbaria accessed at bryophyteportal.org. Bryophytes are non-vascular plants like mosses. I used the same query as for the Great Plains Region Herbarium Network. That is, State equal “South Dakota”, county equal “Minnehaha” and locality equal “Devil;Devils;Gulch;Palisade;Palisades;Garretson;Split”. As before, this gets any collection recorded with a locality that contains any of the words listed.
List of Plants
This plant list was generated on October 16, 2025. It does not include anything added after this date. There is a column in the report where the plant is only known historically from collections. These are the plants that could use an observation on iNaturalist as well as any plant that is not on the list. I highly recommend submitting observations to iNaturalist. Periodically I will update the list.
Plant list
Download the list of plants. They are grouped by kinds of plants such as trees, grasses, and forbs.
Definition of Kinds of Plants
Download the definition of kinds of plants