Last spring, when I decided on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit for my CLM location, the reality of moving across the country had not yet occurred to me. I was just excited to explore a beautiful place I’d never been! Aside from a couple b’nai mitzvah when I was younger, I’ve never spent much time on the West Coast. As a third generation New Yorker, its nothing short of treason to think about moving out west. The night before my flight, after a healthy amount of crying and hugging my best friends, I started worrying about leaving them, the Northeast, and all its familiar plants.

On my first day in Tahoe, I went for a bike ride to the Forest Service office to get to know the route. I took in the views of the snowcapped mountains, the cool, dry air, and the fields of wildflowers. Smiling and feeling a bit more settled, I rounded the corner and was immediately too close to the second bear I’d seen in my life (the first was as I drove into town). After getting some distance from the bear, I had a little moment of panic, followed by concerns that I’d be late on my first day of work because of a bear in my path.

Thankfully, that problem hasn’t come up (yet). For most of my first week, I worked with the rest of the botany crew to restore a meadow along Burke Creek. With the help of the crew, I quickly began recognizing invasive plants and their native lookalikes. Target species for removal included spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe), sulfur cinquefoil (Potentilla recta), and what quickly became my least favorite plant of all time, bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare). If you have never had the misfortune of laying eyes on Cirsium vulgare, picture the most hostile-looking weed you can, covered in spines that end up lining your work gloves. Mess with the bull thistle, get the thorns. We cut off and bagged any bull thistle flower heads before uprooting the plant, ensuring no viable seeds would enter the seed bank this year. As I identified and pulled out weed after weed, I started to feel a bit more rooted in my new environment.

My co-intern, Gerardo, and I then began working with one of our target species, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), by scouting for viable seed collection trees. Whitebark pine is listed as a federally threatened species, largely due to an invasive fungal pathogen called white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola). In our surveys, we are looking for healthy, mature whitebark pines within infected stands. These individuals have likely been exposed to the fungus and remain uninfected, indicating the potential for resistant offspring. Whitebark pines primarily live in the subalpine zone (9,000 to 11,000 ft in elevation), so we drove a forest service Silverado up into the mountains to find them. Aside from the initial terror of driving a federally-owned truck on rocky dirt roads and a touch of elevation sickness, the scouting was a great way to see the Basin; the views from the peaks were incredible.

 As my second week at LTBMU comes to a close, I am so grateful to my past self for making this decision without any consideration of future anxieties. The Basin is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been in my life and every day I get to explore more of it. I am so excited for the rest of my field season! As much as I miss my friends, getting to know the LTBMU botany crew has been so fun and reassuring. I also suspect I may lure some of my friends here with my daily pictures of our field sites. To quote a response to my field photo from this morning, “ur lying and evil and I hate you and im legit gonna look for flights rn. is there a lake tahoe airport? where does one fly into.”

Despite my fair share of bull-thistle-inflicted stab wounds, I am starting to fall in love with South Lake Tahoe, California. I’m definitely not ready to say West Coast best coast, but West Coast…equally great coast!

“Bloom where you’re planted,” you whisper to the water lily seed as you cast her into the sweet rich earth of a tallgrass prairie, no open water in sight.

A foundational idea in seed collecting is the existence of seed transfer zones: regions within which plants can be transferred with a great likelihood of successful propagation. Sure, hoary tansyaster – Machaeranthera canescens – grows across the West. But evidence shows that seeds collected from North Dakota’s glacial plains are unlikely to survive long in Arizona’s semi-arid highlands. If we’re thoughtful about where a population comes from and the condition to which that population is adapted, we should have a better outcome when reseeding that population in restoration projects.

This idea is challenging for me in our current era. Not the idea of transfer zones; I understand how plants adapt deeply to an ecosystem. Plant species move around pretty slowly all things considered. Birds and bears and other animals scatter their seeds, sure, but they don’t have wings or legs of their own.

Here’s what challenges me. The climate is changing, warming quickly. Precipitation patterns are less reliable. Some of our coworkers in New Mexico are dealing with fires and floods, and others are experiencing the leftovers of Hurricane Beryl. Every month is the hottest month on record. It’s hard to understand what this means for seeds, who have spent millennia adapting to more predictable environments. There is a real possibility that a lot of the species we’re collecting now won’t survive these fast changes, and for me the instability of all of this seems like it would really impact the idea of a transfer zone.

But there, dense bunches of threeawn grass growing densely through cracks in the hot Tucson asphalt. Bushes of mock vervain erupting in the rubble where Southwestern canyons were detonated for mining projects or to build the border wall. Cheerful sunflower – never a species to be contained – filling up the highway margins and spilling down the railroad easements. Understanding where a plant can thrive, in which conditions a species can survive, is far beyond my job description and personal intellect.

There’s probably some wisdom here about how we’re all in our own version of transfer zones, with places where we are more likely to grow and thrive, and places that would wither us immediately. I’ll leave you to decide what this analogy means for you. I’m personally very excited to be in the Sonoran Desert, where ferns grow next to cacti and yucca, where I can grow in my experiences of plant identification and understanding the diverse ecosystems of the Coronado National Forest (which has low desert and alpine forest and oak scrubland and everything in between). I can’t be sure, but I think I’m planted somewhere I’ll bloom.

Driving up from the Central Valley of California, I was struck by the rapidly changing landscape as I wound my way up Highway 50. Already, I knew I was lucky to work here for the next several months. Not only was I met with gorgeous views, I noticed a remarkably cooler temperature, feeling grateful to escape the almost-one-hundred-degree heat back home.

Lake Tahoe is nested within the Tahoe Basin, surrounded by peaks on all sides. At about 6,500 feet above sea level, the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit is where I will employ, hone, and develop my skills as botanist.

Almost immediately, I began exploring the flora of the Lake Tahoe region, expanding my collection of iNaturalist observations. Being at a such a high elevation, this area can support plants unique from the lower, hotter, and drier areas to the east and west. Some of my favorite sightings of native plants include Scouler’s St. John’s wort (Hypericum scouleri), white bog orchid (Platanthera dilatata), Washington lily (Lilium washingtonianum, although it was not in bloom), and Oregon checker mallow (Sidalcea oregana). The majority of these were found growing in meadows or along streams. The Washington lily, however, inhabited a very sunny and dry slope.

A lot of my time in the field so far has been spent remediating introduced species invasion to reduce their impact on native flora and their habitat. One of the particularly prolific species is bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare). Bull thistle tends to grow in damp areas–in the vicinity of streams or in wet meadows. The preferred treatment for this weed is manual pulling, with a hori-hori making sure to take as much of the thick taproot as possible. If a plant begins bolting or flowering, the inflorescence has to be cut, bagged, and tossed in the garbage. Its sharp spines make leather gloves absolutely necessary. A native look-alike species, Anderson’s thistle (Cirsium andersonii) looks extremely similar, and I spent some time learning to distinguish the two. For one, the flower head is vase-shaped in bull thistle and cylinder-shaped in Anderson’s. The leaves on bull thistle are much rougher and its stems grow spines. It is also very helpful that Anderson’s thistle usually grow in drier locations, so the two species often don’t overlap.

Toward the end of the month, me and Kendall, my co-intern, have begun preliminarily checking out seed collection sites, and I am especially looking forward to doing more work with the whitebark pine. I hope there is much to update about this in the future.

Before moving to Tucson – everyone who had lived here at some point in their lives would always tell me how great monsoon season was. I didn’t get my hopes up as for the last 2 years, Tucson has experienced especially long, hot and dry summers.

But, to my surprise – I like to imagine it as a wholesome welcome gift to me – the environment has brought not just an early monsoon season but a generous one. The most rewarding part of experiencing this summer’s desert rain is witnessing the ocotillos transition from barren to happy & thriving within just a matter of days – it’s a wonderful reminder of how resilient nature can be.

Within my first few weeks of working on the Coronado crew, we had the opportunity to camp for two nights at the top of Mt. Graham to assist Soil Scientists – Henry and Eric – in identifying plants within their study site. I never been humbled as quickly as being thrown into ID-ing sedges on my first botanizing trip. Never will I ever take my beloved hand lens for grated again.

Overall, my experience work in Coronado NF so far has been equally challenging and exciting – and I’m very grateful I get to do this work.

Some things I’m especially grateful for this week

• hearing Mexican Spotted Owls singing in the night
• liquidIV
• my co-intern/ now friend Bees validating me on my truck driving abilities
• the Mt. Graham meadow where I identified my first graminoid
• monsoon storms lowering the Arizona temp by 10 degrees
• camp site ramen after a long day’s work
• the humidity rehydrating my dry desert skin
• desert sunsets and morning walks to my field office

More of a re-potting, really… Here we are in Sheridan, Wyoming! To the West, the Big Horn National Forest rises up from gentle foothills blanketed in Yellow Sweet Clover. Within the forest, the Cloud Peak Wilderness juts into the sky, Cloud Peak poking its crown higher than 13,000 feet! The air here is rarer than in the mountains familiar to me, Washington’s Cascades and Olympics. Just a few weeks ago, I plucked up my roots from my hometown of Seattle to embark on an adventure to learn the flora of the rest of the country and to provide a valuable resource for conservation projects in our National Forests: Native seeds!

It’s early in the season, especially at the higher elevations in the forest. Snow had just melted out of the montane meadows only a few weeks before we arrived in early June. This means many plants are just coming out, and the earliest blooms are now in flower. Still too early to collect seed! Right now, the Rocky Mountain Herbarium Specimen Database and iNaturalist have been our best friends as we use historic records to locate populations of plants on our collection list. Some of the best finds have been several great populations of Eriogonum umbellatum (Sulfur buckwheat) in flower that will be ready for collection in a week or two.

There’s a lot to know on any one Forest, and when we’re not out scouting populations for seed collection, we’re getting a grand tour of the scope of what a Forest Service botany crew works on day in and day out.  

We’ve been out with hydrologists planning the best spots for willow plantings in a wetland restoration site with beaver dam analogs. The willows need moist spots that won’t get too waterlogged, and they’ll need to be fenced in for protection (baby willows are tasty moose munch!)

We’ve documented locations of sensitive species, keying out the sensitive Linanthus watsonii in the field, which looks a lot like its more common cousin, Phlox hoodii. We located Linanthus very near to a popular climbing spot in Ten Sleep Canyon, which gets a LOT of traffic, so botanists here need to assess what special precautions should be taken to protect this special plant. 

Along the way, there have been plenty of Foresters to meet, landmarks to learn, and of course, plants to get excited about. We’re getting the lay of the land and picking up the lingo too—if you told us there’s Monarda past Burgess up on Freeze Out, we’d know exactly what you mean (and we’d be pumped!)  

“In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

When I think of carnivorous plants I imagine the jungles of South America and swamplands of Florida and Australia. When I think of Sphagnum moss I imagine the peat bogs of Northern Ireland. When I think of these species together, I do not think of Northwestern Montana.

It turns out Northwestern Montana has intermittent patches of a very specific ecosystem type known as a fen. Fens are a type of wetland where water sits or flows year round close to the ground surface which prevents the decomposition of organic material which leads to the formation of peaty poor in nutrients soil (Weixelman & Cooper 2009). While fens are found all over the world, the type of fen found in Northwestern Montana is considered a Rocky Mountain Subalpine-Montane Fen (Montana Field Guides) and due to the year round presence of water, these fens are biodiversity hotspots!

On Monday June 24th my crew and I drove down and forest service road to go set up a long term study in the Porcupine Fen to observe species richness and abundance over time (photos 1-2) This was my first time experiencing an ecosystem like this and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Approaching the fen we trudged through mucky sticky water and tangled shrubs until we got to a clearing, upon first glace it just looks like a grassy shrub land, but then you look a little closer…

… the intensity of species richness is easy to see! Not only are fens one of the only habitats in Montana where one can find Sphagnum Moss in abundance, it is the only ecosystem were you can find Montana’s incredible and unexpected native carnivorous sundew species!

Drosera rotundifolia and Drosera anglica are species of sundew, a type of flowering plant that has adapted to live peaty poor soil nutrient conditions found in fens. The adaption you ask? Capturing and digesting small invertebrates!

Drosera species accomplish this carnivorous act by showing off beautifully bright red spike-like “tentacles” on it’s leaves that have mucilage that glistens in the sun like dew drops. When an insect lands on one of these attractive leaves, they become stuck, unable to free themselves. The plant then releases proteins that will digest the insect so that the plant can absorb ammonia and other key nutrients they’re missing from the poor peat like soil quality (Flora of North America).

Sundews are not the only species that have evolved to live in these low nutrient conditions. We observed several rare orchid species that are also only found in peaty bog like environments (photos 5-7). However, instead of consuming insects to supplement their nutrition needs, these orchids rely on their symbiotic relations with mycorrhizal fungi ( Maris et al., 2023).

Seeing such a unique environment was really inspiring. As a young scientist there’s nothing quite like exploring an ecosystem that has so much left to be discovered. The relationship between these flowing plants, the carnivorous plants, the moss, and the mycorrhizal fungi in these fen systems is extremely under researched and has me thinking a lot about future project ideas.

I am looking forward to exploring more fens and other unique Montana ecosystems that inspire me this summer, including alpine white park pine habitat! (but that’s for another blog post 🙂

– Erynn
Flathead National Forest, MT

Imagine spread in front of you is an open I Spy book. You look at the list of objects you’re supposed to be finding in the chaos and … you don’t even know what any of the objects look like. This is kind of how it has felt for me transitioning from the dry deserts of New Mexico and Utah to the flora in the Alpine Meadows and stands of Pine in Wyoming.

A whole new suite of plant species spreads in front of me that I am somehow supposed to identify, find large enough populations of, and collect seed from. For the past weeks I’ve been searching for specific plants (alongside my co intern in the Big Horn Mountains, Nick Gjording), only a couple of which I’ve seen in the wild before. That’s not even mentioning the grasses that make up half our species list that blend in nicely to the background of the I Spy page in front of us.

My time so far in the Bighorn National Forest has been spent driving to hopeful plant locations or desperately scanning out the car window (remember those in car I spy games when your sibling would inexplicitly say “I spy with my little eye, something green”? … yeah). When the time comes to get outside, and I hopelessly scan the ground for the plants on our list.

During the furious scanning back and forth, between checking grass ligules and looking at the hairs on yellow asters, something amazing happens. When you look so closely at a defined area, you start to notice all the little things that are so easy to pass over. It’s like finding a tiny figure of your favorite dog breed or seeing the cutest rubber ducky on the I Spy page. Some of the highlights in our adventures include spying a light pink Lupin plant (they’re normally a dark blue-ish purple here), a patch of liverworts (which, as a Bryophyte enthusiast myself, was especially exciting), and a multitude of interesting new-to-me plants. I even spied some Yucca, a plant familiar from my “hometown” experiences I didn’t even realize grew this far North.

And occasionally, a miracle happens, and you manage to find a suitable population! In the weeks of planning and scouting that have already happened, despite how early in the growing season we are (especially in those higher elevation areas) coming up on those populations is a satisfying feeling like no other.

In one case, we spent a couple of days searching for Eriogonum umbellatum, only finding one or two occasional individuals. Then, within the next few days we came across two independent and large populations; all that hard work paid off. Later I’ll get to return to these populations, hopeful that nature will have taken its course, and everything will have aligned so the plants can have bloomed, been pollinated, and be producing seed. Hopeful, I write down the location of the population and cross my fingers that I won’t miss that slice of time when the seeds are ready for us to collect.

In this real-time, real-life I Spy book, I’ve somehow managed to take a list of unknowns in the large and very green spread in front of me and find what I was looking for, and even more that I wasn’t expecting.

But the season is only beginning. Imagine that in your book more frustration, excitement, and unexpected finds lay in front of you. As the season progresses, you know that things will only get easier; that list of unknowns will slowly but surely become more familiar and understood. The list at the bottom of your I Spy page is no longer full of nebulous, unrecognizable words but a list of familiar and perhaps even crossed off treasures. You’ve now completed maybe the first page of the I Spy book that you’ll continue to work through for the rest of the field season, and you can’t wait to intimately know that crucially important list of objects, their unique locations, and the beauty that surrounds it all.  

With a swish and a thump, Beth secures an iridescent insect in her net. Seconds before, the bee was busy flying back and forth on a determined path, visiting a network of dangling flowers, ripe with sweet nectar. Swoop! Another bee in the jar. I snag a tiny wasp covered in pink pollen. The rush of watching tiny insects jump between flowers in a coordinated dance enthralls us. Suddenly Pauleen shouts “time is up!” and we lay down our nets.

We’re here to support Lewisia kelloggii-a rare plant of the Eldorado National Forest that makes its living on exposed lava caps and decomposed granite soils. The prostrate rosette of fleshy leaves emerges after the snow melts in spring, and the brilliant white flowers follow soon after. Pollinators flock to the exposed sites, feasting on a diverse array of nectar producers. As they buzz from tiny annuals to bushy perennials, they create a pollinator network; a web of interactions which enables both insects and plants to thrive.

Our work will help the research team at Cal State East Bay build an understanding for what pollinators are in the network of our rare Lewisia. We will then be able to collect seeds from the plants that flower earlier and later in the season, supporting the pollinators and in turn supporting the Lewisia.

The first few weeks of the field season have been an exciting time! We’ve already dealt with a fire scare, stuck vehicles (not ours hah), flat tires (also not us) and the onslaught of new knowledge that happens when moving to a new place and staring at the ground all day. It has been wonderful, and I can’t wait to deepen my relationship with this place and all the creatures that inhabit it.

I’ll admit I was quite nervous to start this job and move to Montana. Coming from MA, one of the most densely populated states in the US, to MT, one of the least populated states, was quite intimidating. I was preparing myself for quite a difficult adjustment, but I have actually been having a lovely time and the adjustment has been easy.

So far I have been doing A LOT of learning. Being from the east coast I had to learn a bunch of new flora that I have never seen before. I have found a lot of comfort seeing plants like Mountain Bluebells and Glacier Lilies which are very similar to species we have where I am from. The whole structure of forests and other ecosystems here are entirely different than what I am used to, but it has been a fun challenge. Coming from a place with mostly deciduous forests it was surprising to see the forests full on conifers. All of the pines make the forests smell so good and I love walking around in them or just sitting next to a stream and taking in my surroundings. People told me Montana was beautiful, but there is no way to understand the true beauty of Montana without seeing it.

Now, about the cows. Everywhere you go in Montana you will see cows, you might not see a person, but the cows are ever present. After one of our scouting trips we were driving back to the Ranger station when we realized we were approaching animals in the road. Being that we were in a national forest I was preparing myself for deer or maybe even a bear. That is when we realized it was a bunch of loose cows! For a little we just stared at the cows and they stared back at us. Eventually my partner had to get out of the car and clap to heard the cows out of the road. I have a feeling that will not be our last cow encounter in the field.