Time is flying-

I’m finishing up my 7th week working out in the BLM Bishop field office. My days are full of plant scouting/collecting, bird counting and luxurious weekends. I successfully completed my first seed collection for SOS of Lepidium flavum– a tiny yellow annual in the mustard family. The plant only grows up to a few inches tall, so I was dreading crawling through the hot desert sand full of Amsinckia tessellata bristles.  But the collection actually proved to be effortless, as each handful of seeds ranged from 100-300 seeds. I made sure to collect well over 10,000 seeds. I wouldn’t be surprised if I actually came close to 20,000-25,000! L. flavum seeds are about the size of sand grains, so accuracy can be difficult but hey the more the merrier. This collection was made in the scenic Alabama Hills, a popular set location for western films due to the striking landscape and juxtaposition of the dry desert and looming peaks of the Eastern Sierra.

The Alabama Hills- my work space for my Lepidium flavum seed collection. Mt Whitney is up there somewhere!

My days of plant scouting have been beautiful. I’ve been collecting vouchers for potential seed collections and I’m up to about 23 vouchers. Ideally I will be able to make seed collections from all of these species. One of my vouchered species (Grayia spinosa) went to seed and got blown out by high winds, which was very sad. But there are two other populations that have great potential and are located in less extreme areas- I’m optimistic!

The Desert Peach (Prunus andersonii) has been blooming like crazy in the central regions of the Bishop BLM property out here.

I’ve additionally encountered interesting insects, which always tugs at my love of entomology. Pollinators like monarchs and sphinx moths are busy at work and colorful sap sucking beetles litter the shrubs. The mosquitoes have not been an issue… yet. With all the water from the snow melt, the mosquitoes are expected to be terrible this year- I’m scared because I’m one of those people they love to feast on.

These playful little guys love to flutter around my bouquets of voucher specimens- Hyles lineata (Hawk/Sphinx moth).

The landscape out here is changing rapidly as the ice and snow sheds off the Eastern Sierras. The days are warming, which is making the early morning Sage Grouse counts more pleasant. I’ve heard tales of single digit temperatures on these mornings in years past, so I’m incredibly grateful to have temperatures in the high 30s low 40s- it’s still freezing for my Southern California skin but well worth it. Sage grouse are the weirdest birds I’ve seen, they’re incredibly entertaining. It would be much more difficult to brave the 2:30 AM wake up times and freezing temperatures to observe a less interesting animal.

We use telescopes to count the grouse and keep our distance from their mating grounds (Leks). Long Valley.

Grouse counts in Bodie can be cold! My co-worker scouting for birds on this blistery morning in the snow and wind.

Strange lighting in the Bodie hills during our bird counts- Bodie is a famous ghost town so you tell me what’s going on here.

It’s not all work out here in Bishop (the work really doesn’t even feel like work) there’s plenty of playtime. Bishop is a spectacular climbing area- climbers come from all around the world to work their stuff in the boulder fields.

Climbing in the caves at the Buttermilks on the weekend.

And the hiking is out of this world…

Things are heating up in Bishop! As the wild flowers keep doing their thing I’ll keep doing mine. Excited to get my SOS collections done and see more interesting animals and insects.

Till next time-

Brittany Betz – BLM Bishop Field Office

When people learn that I am a part of the CLM Program that is through the Chicago Botanic Garden, the first thing that happens is my being asked if I am from Chicago. The second thing that happens, when they learn that I am, in fact, from Atlanta, is that I receive a smirk and am given a casual comment about how Atlanta, Georgia has to be pretty different from Vale, Oregon.

“Casual,” is a key word there; it’s really too blase, because compared to Atlanta, Vale is a completely different world! It’s not simply because it’s on the other side of the country, but the population and town sizes are smaller, there are no tall buildings and it occasionally smells like onions … The craziest thing though, there are barely any trees!

Please try to understand, I’m a nature girl. My bachelors is in Wildlife Biology. I love being outside, and in Georgia, being outside in nature means being surrounded by a mosaic of tree species, it means hiking in the woods, with rolling hills, and it means sweating and seeking a nonexistent relief from the humid, hot, buggy atmosphere. I love Georgia.

Coming to Vale was quite a shock. When you think of Oregon, your mind automatically travels to Portland, a rainy metropolis where it’s rumored that only the tourist use umbrellas, so imagine my surprise when I was told that Vale, which is in the eastern most part of the state, right up alongside the Idaho border, is actually a part of the Oregon High Desert. There are a lot of hills and mountainous areas in Eastern Oregon … with very few trees and because it sits east of the Cascades, it’s in what is called a Rain Shadow, creating an area that receives little rainfall.

Another surprise is that “high desert” doesn’t equate to a large area with nothing but sand and the occasional oasis. The area surrounding Vale is so pleasantly unique from what I know, with its foreign wildlife, winding rivers, large lakes and shrubby hills, and it is so surprisingly beautiful that I find myself bursting with excitement at the opportunities to go out, explore, and learn about this new world.

I’m working as a GIS intern. I don’t have the opportunity to be outside all the time, but I’ve already received several opportunities to go out, see and do some really cool things that are unique to the BLM in Vale, Oregon. I’m glad to say my shock, has turned into delight, as I slowly adapt to my new surroundings.

I’m so excited for the adventures ahead.

It has warmed up quickly in Maryland this year.  I spent a lot of time surveying the limestone bluffs along the Potomac River which has a very nice spring ephemeral display.  In my previous season working at the canal I arrived after the peak of this floral display. Twinleaf is a prime example of one these spring ephemeral species.

Jeffersonia diphylla (Twinleaf) I don’t always catch this species with flower because they last for a short period of time.

I keyed out a couple new invasive plant species as well.  The first was Thlaspi alliaceum (Garlic Pennycress).  This weed seems well established in Maryland and probably has been for a while.  It has been described as a “newly invading species” by some in states such as Ohio as recently as 2015. It occupies acres upon acres of fallow agricultural fields in the Hagerstown Valley and occasionally occurs in smaller though still dense patches along the floodplain forest of the Potomac River.  These observations lead me to believe it prefers open sun and recently disturbed soil.  I have never seen it in upland habitats.  It looks similar to some other weedy species of the Brassicaceae family.  One of the better diagnostic characters of Garlic Pennycress is the slight garlic odor it emits when the tissue is broken.  It belongs to the same tribe as Alliaria petiolate (Garlic Mustard).

Thlaspi alliaceum (Garlic Pennycress) The light green in this photo is Garlic Pennycress flowering in the thousands in a farm field close to the canal.

The other invasive species is Lamium galeobdolon (Yellow Archangel).  I found a small patch along the Potomac River in central Maryland.  The Mid-Atlantic Exotic Plant team of the National Park Service recently released an invasive plant alert for this species in the region.  I reported the location of this species to the Park Biologist for eradication.

Lamium galeobdolon (Yellow Archangel) To my knowledge this is the first time this invasive plant has been recorded in the canal boundary.

The state Natural Heritage Program botanist was nice enough to meet me in the falls line area of Maryland to review several species of Amelanchier that he had done genetic testing on several years earlier.  Amelanchier nantucketensis is one of the G1-G3 plant species that I am focusing my surveying efforts on this season.  We found it in flower and he schooled me on some of the nuances of hybridization within this genus and their morphological character overlap.

Amelanchier nantucketensis (Nantucket Serviceberry) The short and narrow petals of this species are diagnostic. Interestingly, the petals will sometimes bare pollen.

I briefly visited the shale barrens of western Maryland as well and was happy to find a few of the endemic plants that grow there in flower.

Trifolium virginicum (Kate’s Mountain Clover) Shale Barren endemic

Coleman Minney

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park

This week has really been the best week that I have had so far in Southern Oregon. The weather has been somewhat cooperating and has made it awesome for weekend activities.

Last weekend I went to Crater Lake National Park. I went with the intent to do two short hikes and enjoy lunch on the rim over looking the lake. I however was not aware that there was going to be over 20 feet of snow covering most of the roads in the park.

Well the best thing you can do in a situation like that is to adapt and to overcome. So naturally in the spirit of fun and adventure, when the park ranger offered up snow shoes to rent, I did a 5 mile snow shoe trek around the rim of Crater Lake. And let me tell you the views were incredible, the sun burn afterwards not so fun.

The next day was Earth Day and there was an event in Ashland, OR that the BLM had a booth and their salmon tent set up at. So I volunteered to help out with it. Having kids come up and play for hours in the costumes, and wait in line to go into the salmon tent to have a story read to them is such a great way to spend the day. It was a super rewarding way to have fun and interact with the local community.

Then this week allowed me to have a pretty incredible random experience………….. I got to meet elephants. That’s right. Elephants. I got to feed elephants. I got to pet elephants. I got to shake trunks with elephants. It was the most incredible chance encounter ever.

I had to cross private land in order to reach a rare plant survey plot that I needed to get done that day. So I called up the resident and he was more than happy to let me come and park my car and walk across his land to get there. When I arrive at his property, he tells me he runs an exotic animal farm so not to be alarmed if I heard any elephants. And naturally I was very confused and I’m pretty sure my mouth dropped to the floor. He laughed and invited me to meet his two elephants. Honestly what amazing creatures to have in your backyard.

And that has easily been the best week so far.

Sierra Sampson

Medford, Oregon BLM

After eight days of I-40, racing wild horses along side the highway, exploring the Southwest, and being decidedly far from my Appalachian mountain town, I finally made it to the high desert town of Burns, Oregon. Here, I have started my five month term as a riparian intern with the Bureau of Land Management.

While some of my first week has been arduous computer trainings, system enrollments, and rental agreements, there has been plenty of time spent soaking up the natural surroundings offered by BLM wilderness areas and Malheur forests. Our first field assignment took us to hills facing the marvelous snow-capped Steens mountain range, flanked by flooded ranches and flatlands supporting populations of countless bird species, wild burros, antelope, and elk. My fellow CLM intern, Rachel Wood, our mentor, Jarod, and BLM rangeland manager Lisa started our day at 7am to begin on-the-ground demarcation of Western Juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) stands for removal on local public lands. The tree’s post-settlement (new growth) stands have outcompeted some portions of sagebrush habitats, most notably of the sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). Much of BLM’s management in the area comes back to protection of this indicator species, as its health reflects the overall ecological health of sagebrush landscapes.

But what does riparian ecology have to do with this? In the desert of all places?

Simply put, removing these junipers frees up various resources, allows for greater storage of water, and production of valuable meadow and riparian habitats for plant species and wildlife forage. This is only one element of riparian health, as well as overall ecological management in the area affected by high density Juniper stands.

My education on the very wet and green east coast mountain ranges will definitely be tested in my new high desert home! As Jarod has explained to me, a difference of 4 inches of rainfall could have serious implications for fire season, vegetation, and wildlife populations. Snow melt from the winter and early spring months provides a large proportion of water used for plants to green out this time in the season. The summer months will invite fire crews, drought season, and temperatures much hotter than the current 50 degree highs. Lips dry, and hands reaching for bight pink tape, we continued walking along the border and flagging the perimeter of one of five 4-mile Juniper stands. In the distance, the Steens mountains reflect bright white caps; the contrast and variation of East Oregon is unlike any location I have had the opportunity to study. As our day winds down, we round the final finger of land mapped to be visited today. The area we mark will be cut by next October, if all funding and fieldwork goes accordingly. After Junipers are cut, it is expected that native shrubs and forbs will return in higher volumes.

Our field team rejoins to talk news drama and pet our canine field assistant, Dee. Our long day of work has started my journey of understanding this landscape, and enjoying its beauty!

Over my first eight weeks at the Ridgecrest office, I’ve slowly grown accustomed to the procedures of making SOS collections. And thankfully, with some help from Sarah De Groot (a field botanist from The Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden), my fellow intern and I have gained some competency in local field botany. But, happily, just as I’d begun to settle into the process of scouting and seed collection, new tasks and challenges appeared, maintaining the pace of learning and adaptation that was set by the first few weeks of work here.

Two weeks ago, I felt as though I was just first coming to grips with the process of making Seeds of Success collections, when Sarah De Groot took me and two other interns along on a collection trip in the Amargosa Range, near Death Valley. However, while she instructed us on exactly how to make a collection of either seed or tissue, Sarah didn’t necessarily stress the importance of always being prepared to make an SOS collection. As I’ve now experienced on multiple occasions, upon setting out to scout for populations, I won’t necessarily find the plants that I need. However, I may find a large, healthy population on a day which was initially set aside for range land health assessments, or for monitoring a listed species. While herbarium and database consulting was useful in the first weeks here, overall, the most productive strategy has been to simply keep my eyes open and be prepared to make voucher collections while going about other business.

Our camp for the night, near Twelvemile Spring, at sunset.

The most recent work that has come my way is the task of monitoring a few State listed plant populations in our field office. In particular, my fellow Ridgecrest intern and I were met by another working botanist from the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, Naomi Fraga. She did her Master’s work on the Kelso valley region of Kern County, near Weldon, California. As such, she was interested in joining us for a quick estimate of the Mimulus shevockii population in the area, which was subjected to a burn during last year’s Erskine Fire.
Luckily, the fire appeared to burn relatively cool in the area. Although the area covered by the burn was large, it didn’t appear to affect the seed bed of M. shevockii, which bounced back in even higher numbers than were found last year just before the fire. We estimated that the region supports around 1,220 individuals total, with about 55% of them in the fire-affected area. Since the Erskine fire was widely hailed as one of the most destructive in Kern County’s history, it is nice to see that some of the local plant life has managed to pull through. And, on another positive note, it would appear that like the local plant life, nearby communities affected by the Erskine fire have also begun to reclaim areas lost to the blaze.

The Kelso Creek area, one year after the Erskine fire.

A rather large example of Mimulus shevockii Heckard & Bacig.

Ironically enough, many other areas of the Ridgecrest field office have been subjected to flooding this year, due to uncharacteristically heavy rainfall. That rainfall ended the five-year drought which contributed to the intensity of the Erskine fire, but it has also been responsible for flooding throughout the state. We need to make significant policy changes to combat the effects and causes of this volatile weather, in order to protect both ourselves and the environment around us. As we saw many times this year, we cannot always insulate ourselves from the effects that severe weather has on the landscape. Human lives are also tied up in the balance.

-Jonathon

As spring begins to slowly creep into Anchorage, AK, so does the summer 2017 field season. New software installs for field PCs, digital and physical data clean-up/organization, equipment inventories and government training courses begin taking up a considerable chunk of time. Lucky for me, I already went through the wringer last season with government fieldwork-related training standard to RM positions in Alaska. So the training workload is much lighter this time around.

My recent worklife, among other projects, has been primarily focused on QA/QC of the past 4 years of Forest Vegetation Inventory Surveys (FORVIS) to assure it meets all of the requirements specified by the FORVIS protocol, and also compatibility with the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), which has yet to be established in the state of Alaska. Consolidation of this data has proved tricky, and I am happy to have finally started wrapping up the project. Ironically, the entry of our data could not have had better timing, as the inventory system is soon to be decommissioned this month and plot data transferred to the Ecosurvey database and transferring to it everything collected with FORVIS and its associated protocol. I cannot say this is particularly saddening for AK, as we have yet to actually submit any data to the mother database, Informix, which will no longer be the final resting place of the forest inventory data. It’s both impressive and incredibly frustrating in realization of how quickly technology becomes outdated and must be replaced. I just hope that the FORVIS data collected in the past is properly integrated into the new system. In the meantime, I am producing ArcMap feature classes for all our existing data based on the lat longs I have been able to track down, and hoping this spatial data can be utilized for cross reference once everything has been migrated into Ecosurvey.

Looking forward to the next month, we have AIM training in Billings, MT, ATV/UTV training and bear safety coming up shortly. Before I know it, I’ll be getting dropped out of a helicopter to conduct ecological site descriptions in the boreal forest. Boo-ya!

Best of luck to all to all the new CLM interns soon to relocate all over US in the name of conservation! You are soon to become part of this exciting effort, and surrounded by the passionate individuals that facilitate its development.

Jacob

For my third and final CLM internship I am in our nation’s floristic gem. I’ve been reeling in excitement since spring’s arrival, so many plants and so little time! I was very worried about starting work in the California Floristic Province due to the number of plants, I felt pretty rough from not being able to botanize over winter. However, a lot of my fears have been allayed- and while I’m definitely not back at even close to full ability yet, I am on the upswing.

Vertic clay soil community, Panoche Hills

I am working in the Central Coast field office with botanist Ryan O’Dell. For the last month and a half we have largely been working in the San Joaquin Desert ecosystem. It is a rather interesting system and while a part of the CFP has a very strong Mojave desert (Dmoj) affinity. As I always like to think about it, why learn one flora when you can be a geek and work on learning two floras? The area has allowed me to start to learn about the hot desert, and annual plant life. I have actually had very little experience with the annual life cycle so this is very valuable experience. In particular I am very interested in inconspicuous low statute annuals, especially when they are ‘understory’ (of other annuals!). I’m finally seeing a lot of stuff I’ve been reading in Venable papers, especially about year to year co-existence dynamics. I have a whole slew of questions stemming from these topics now, but am having difficulties designing experiments to test them.

In principal our work tasks are simple, to survey and document the diversity of plant life across our field district. Our area, which is mostly in San Benito county is a pretty incredible natural laboratory. Their is a diverse range of geologies (e.g. Sandstone, Marine shale, and Serpentine) generating a number of soils which foster distinct edaphic endemic plant species. Due to a lot of this area being poorly accessible due to steep topography, private ranch ownership, and few roads, the area is shockingly under-botanized, for any Western state, let alone California. Accordingly, many of the plants which occur on these unique soils have been seldom collected historically and are believed by many to warrant some type of conservation status.

sandstone conglomerate ‘fin’, with marine shale in foreground

So we survey extensively, and share information regarding the number, location, and general size of the local plants and their populations. Fortunately, due to Ryan’s understanding of the relationships between geology, soils, and plants, we have been able to find many very large populations. Furthermore, what’s awesome is that due to their edaphic habitats these plants are not being encroached upon by noxious weeds, and their habitats are generally undesirable for human usage (eg. mineral or fossil fuel extraction, and cattle ignore them), and so the plants must only adapt in the face of climate change. In my budding professional opinion, a great deal of these species are safe for a long time to come! I anticipate that they may have rather infrequent above-ground showings for a couple hundred years, but will be fine. Fortunately knowing this will allow Conservation efforts to focus on other more deserving of immediate attention taxa.

Caulanthus inflatus (Brassicaceae), interesting study plant for mulling over water dynamics

This job is pretty incredible so far. We basically camp out and spend four days of the week botanizing all day. Then we both split up and spend the next three weekend days botanizing and then tell each other about it during the week. I’m learning a lot, I’ve already collected about 300 specimens for herbaria collections and keyed nearly all of them, and I anticipate that I will keep up to that rate of about 8 plants/day throughout the next few months. As you could imagine I am becoming pretty OK at identifying plants. Most importantly to me is developing my understanding of the relationship between geology, soils, and plant life; and being able to identify soil and minerals types for make astute botanical observations.

As always current readings: closing out on Crawleys Plant Ecology and starting up on John Thompsons  the Coevolutionary Process. I am reading a lot less these days, and well I guess doing science now. I am spending most of my free time collecting and studying specimens. I’m also getting a lot more into plotting, and graphing, my field observations and am slowly warming up on doing more theoretical matrice and mathematical modeling of them and hypothesis derived from these observations.

Assessing reproductive status of disjunct, and slowly recruiting Astragalus pachypus var pachypus

“Not to run away
Just to live a day
To carry my load on my back and walk
On the Crest running next to the sea
The Crest running next to the sea”

-the Crest by Hot Buttered Rum String Band

My last few weeks have been filled with dunes, dunes, dunes, and more dunes!  I’ve got one more transect left, and I’ll admit that I’ll miss doing these surveys.  After a bit of a rocky start learning all of the new species, I’ve become quite familiar with the regulars!  Many of the plants are now blooming as well, and put on quite a show on a sunny day.

My favorite dune plant – Claytonia perfoliata ssp. perfoliata – also known as miner’s lettuce! These guys were hiding under a big bushy lupine!

Dune survey at Mattole Beach! One of the most beautiful places I have ever been!

A pretty patch of Platystemon californicus (cream cups) with a few Plectritis congesta (sea blush) mixed in!

When it has just been too rainy to go out into the field, I’ve been working on my ArcGIS skills, attending meetings, getting ready for SOS collections, and planning out the rest of my internship! Last week I attended the North Coast Botanical Meeting, where biologists from all sorts of government agencies and private industries got together to discuss what they think are the most pressing issues in the Northern CA botany world.  It was really interesting to see what everybody was working on, and a great opportunity to meet a lot of folks I’ll probably be working with in the next few months!

Madie