Do you have a favorite hiking trail near your home?
Do you enjoy identifying all of the plants along the trail?
Do you want to help conserve the native plants of Colorado?

If so, you may want to volunteer for our new “Adopt a Trail” Program. 

Pick any trail in Colorado, develop a list of the plants you find (or update an existing list), and share the information with us.  We will then enter all the plant lists we receive into a database which is presently in production.  When the database is completely online, plant field guides will be available for anyone interested in wildflowers and hiking. The information that you collect will inform us, and any other interested agency, about the overall welfare of Colorado’s  native plants and their habitats.   

CoNPS Volunteers can monitor a local trail once a year, monitor the same trail several times during the season, or monitor as many trails as you want, anywhere in the state, depending on the commitment level of your choice.   The website will also provide high quality photos of the plants, so if you enjoy photography, this volunteer opportunity gives you a chance to share your photos. 
Our ultimate objective is for the Colorado Native Plant Society to be a state-wide repository of all available plant lists.  Our hope is that the database will eventually contain ALL plants that are found along ALL Colorado trails (the exact locations of rare plants will NOT be made public), with the ability to search and provide reports, brochures, and future research data with the following results:

• Find locations of a particular plant around the state, blooming at a specific time along any or all trails within Colorado 
• List any or all plants within certain ecosystems (i.e., riparian, pinon/juniper) across the state
• Track noxious weed encroachment
• Track the bloom time, distribution, and numbers of our native plants over multiple seasons to see what impacts climate change and other environmental factors are having on Colorado’s native plants and their habitats, not just on one trail, but throughout the entire state.  To make this information most useful, trails could be monitored on a more frequent basis for multiple factors.

To volunteer for this program or for more information,

Click to download the following forms:

• Survey Form - Adopt a Trail (pdf)
• Instructions - Adopt a Trail (pdf)
• Photograph Record Report - Adopt a Trail (pdf)
• Abbreviated Survey for Memo Pads (pdf)

If you are not already a member of the Colorado Native Plant Society, to join, please find our membership form at:  http://www.conps.org/Membership/index.shtml

If you, as a CoNPS member, a landowner, or land manager would like to add your existing plant list to our database, or to have a plant list developed by a CoNPS volunteer, please email

For an early preview of our Adopt A Trail webpage, still in production.

Please check out the beta version!

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