Jennifer Lippert

Last Updated on June 16, 2026 by Tom Pratum

2025 NPSO Fellows Award Jennifer Lippert Profile

Leadership, collaboration, and innovations have been Jenny’s strengths and emphasis over her 40-year service at NPSO. Emerald Chapter has been the recipient of these endeavors that have elevated our Chapter’s presence locally and benefited NPSO state wide as is evident from her leading the Emerald Chapter website development team to organizing the 2016 and 2023 NPSO Annual meetings.

Growing up, Jenny moved about starting in Ohio, then to Wisconsin and Connecticut, and finally back to Ohio due to her father’s career moves. Moving a bit west, her leadership skills were motivated and inspired by experiences during a summer in Wyoming’s Wind River Range at the National Outdoor Leadership School. Captured by the western landscape, she pursued her BS in Biology at Colorado College and wrote her undergraduate thesis on “Plant Species Distribution on Limestone and Bolsa Quartzite in Portal, Arizona.” Upon graduation and with limited employment in ecology, Jenny bounced back east and worked at the Smithsonian’s greenhouse complex as well as at some odd jobs before deciding to move all the way west and attend graduate school at University of Oregon (UO) working with Dr. David Wagner as her major professor; while here, she was the recipient of the NPSO Leighton Ho Memorial Field Botany Grant.

Jenny’s NPSO leadership began as she was completing her graduate work on Sidalcea species at UO. From 1990 through 2025, she has been Emerald Chapter President twice, treasurer, secretary, and field trip chair and trip leader. In those positions, she was NPSO liaison and collection coordinator for the annual Mt Pisgah Arboretum Wildflower Festival, and represented NPSO for the development of the 1994 Howard Buford Park Master Plan task force. In recent years, Jenny created a cadre of volunteers who can be called upon to help community or local federal/state agencies conservation efforts. These volunteers have assisted at the Siuslaw National Forest monitoring Abronia umbellata at the coast in 2022 and salvaging Dodecatheon hendersonii from a Eugene Water and Electric construction site in 2023.

Oregon’s native plants, their habitats, and conservation have been interwoven with Jenny’s 32-year tenure as Forest Botanist at Willamette National Forest (WNF). Her research and publications of the reproductive biology of Sidalcea species have contributed to understanding their taxonomy and ecology. As a forest botanist, Jenny was charged with surveying rare plant species in areas where forest management activities were to occur. She collected data on meadows, wetlands, and other high diversity habitats for prescribing restoration of these areas. She also ran the invasive plant program for the forest, which focused on early detection and rapidly responding to target weed species. Involvement with rare plants extended to the NPSO State level with Jenny’s work on the Conservation and R&E Plant Committees. Jenny and Bruce Newhouse coordinated the establishment of the “Rare, Threatened, and Endangered Vascular Plants of Lane County” and compiled two documents on exotic invasives: “Exotic Invasive Plants in Native Habitats of the Southern Willamette Valley” and “Exotic Gardening and Landscaping Plants Invasive in the Southern Willamette Valley, Oregon.” 

Jenny has two areas of contributions to the Emerald Chapter of which she is most proud. The first is her work with Charlene Simpson and her team that published the Vascular Plants of Lane County Oregon: An Annotated Checklist. The Emerald Chapter is the only chapter that has developed a regional plant list. Numerous botany students and professional botanists utilize this checklist for identification and distribution data. The Checklist is a basis for Oregon Biodiversity Information Center’s Triennial Oregon Rare Plant List. Jenny’s future hope for the Checklist is to update it once Oregon Flora Volume 3 is completed. Hopefully, her submitted testimony for funding for Oregon Flora will contribute to that completion. 

The second item of pride is Jenny’s supervision of the Emerald Chapter’s key role in plant collection and display at the annual Mount Pisgah Arboretum Wildflower Festival. Since the mid 2000’s, she has collaborated with the Arboretum, Lane Community College and University of Oregon botany professors and students, as well as former Forest Service colleagues, to coordinate volunteers to collect and assist with the flower display set up at the Festival. Jenny believes that the bringing together of professionals and new botanists in “…a real-time learning experience…is a way to link students with potential future supervisors and to introduce students to potential mentors.”

Jenny’s most recent endeavor is becoming a Lane County Master Gardener and joining the program’s recently formed Native Plants Committee. Lane County’s community benefits from her native plant knowledge combined with her enthusiasm to educate how to bring natives into the home garden.

How did native plants lead to Jenny’s strengths of leadership, collaboration, and innovations? According to Jenny, not only have native plants been at the “center of my interest, personally and professionally, for as long as I can remember,” but her grandmother influenced this passion. One of Jenny’s earliest memories is “of my grandmother walking with me in the woods of southern Ohio to look for jack in the pulpits in the spring.” Who knew jack in the pulpits would eventually lead to studying Sidalcea, protecting rare and endangered plants, and inspiring new botanists to collect, learn about, and display wildflowers at the Mt Pisgah Wildflower Festival?

Gail Baker and Camille Stewart, Emerald Chapter Native Plant Society of Oregon