This month: a restoration story. One of water, salmon and seeds.

Seed collection is a necessary step toward restoration. But this month, we partook in another type of restoration. For one week, we partnered with the larger Tongass NF Fisheries crew and Ketchikan Indian Community (KIC), diverting and re-building a stream.

Toward the beginning of our season, I asked Val (our lovely supervisor), what restoration meant to her. She told me she sees restoration as a two-fold concept: 1. to repair damage we have done in our past, and 2. to enhance and advance natural processes that will eventually occur without human aid. This month’s stream restoration project channeled these perspectives into practice, thinking 100 years down-the-line.

Our large group of people, adorned head to foot in waders or their Grundens and Xtratufs, spent lots of time with and in the river and mud that week. We hauled over 10 logs into the stream, wrapping rope around trees and using blocks to weave the rope through and then drive the logs in. We dug over 10 trenches to place those logs, diverting stream flow and re-establishing the s-curves of the water’s movement.

It was empowering work. Rejuvenating and physically exhausting. It was an excellent group of people. And it was a beautiful thing to be able to see the fruits of our labor. It was also humbling to see the force and capacity of water, to acknowledge that we can dig trenches and place logs and watch the sediment fill, but the river will do its own work to restore, to re-story. This is a river’s restoration story, we are just the hands to help in the process.

(And in a couple of years, hopefully we have a seed-mix to spread along the stream in the aftermath).

All season, I have watched salmon runs swim upstream — swaying bodies moving in company with others against a strong current. While out collecting seeds at Ward Lake, (a common trail and accompanying campground area near town), mostly Spirea splendens (Rosy Spirea) and Carex aquatilis (Water Sedge), you could smell them before you could see them: rotting salmon on the lake shore. When I’d look down in the water and see their carcasses beginning to give way, I’d whisper: “good job. you made it.” Their struggle is all at once inspiring and heart-wrenching. As I bent down to strip seeds along the lake shore, I listened to the beating rain and their relentless splashing.

In late August, Mather and I backpacked the Deer Mountain Traverse, an alpine trail covering 18 miles and spreading along four peaks and a rocky ridge-line. Cassiope mertensiana (White Mountain Heather) and Vaccinium ulinignosum (Bog Blueberry), bursting with fruit, hung low to the ground. Arnicas and Gentians towered over them, tickling our ankles. I don’t believe I will ever get over how small and mighty alpine plants are. Our legs were tired, and our lungs exhausted. And even up there, nestled in the high mountains, water prevailed. Snow fields tapered into snow melt lakes and waterfalls funneled water down to lower lakes, rivers, streams, groundwater, ocean.

Alpine lakes, muskeg bottoms, puddles on pavement after it rains, the breeding grounds of rivers, and the ocean, broad and spreading. Water is everywhere.

August was a time of changing weather, new plant species to scout for, and a newfound independence for the seed girls of Moab. The weather cooled off quite a bit here in Moab over the past month, going from being in the upper 100s everyday to only being in the 90s, and some days we were even fortunate enough to see temperatures in the 80s! On our trips up into the mountains, we were met with daily thunderstorms and the occasional hail instead of the normal dry heat we had become too familiar with. Overall, we became more independent in our seed scouting and collecting and got to take part in many different projects this past month.

We began scouting for our third target species, Heliomeris multiflora, or showy goldeneye! This beautiful member of the Aster family that can be found at a wide variety of elevations ranging from foothills all the way to subalpine. So far, we have found the most Heliomeris at elevations around 10,000 feet. We have identified quite a few large populations, so now we wait for the seeds to mature and get ready for collection!

We have continued to collect seeds from Heterotheca villosa, or hairy false goldenaster, and we seem to stumble upon more populations of it everyday we are out in the field. Although it appears that the seeds of Heterotheca are beginning to pass their prime in most spots as we now enter into September, we are planning on making a few more collections before all the seeds drop. Heterotheca has been my favorite species to collect so far because I find harvesting these little puffballs to be highly satisfying. Is it just me, or do they remind anyone else of Horton Hears a Who? The only downside to collecting these puffs is that you have to be very mindful of the weather. We learned that wind is public enemy number one while trying to collect this species on a particularly windy day. One big gust of wind at the wrong moment and you could lose a lot of progress!

In other exciting news, we got to spend some time up in the alpine with the Botany Crew here in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Hiking into the alpine was like visiting another planet. I found myself wearing three layers and still a bit chilly and hiking across snow in August! Our goal was to assist with alpine vegetation surveys and get some hands-on experience with vegetation plots and transects. I learned so much, though my favorite part was getting to see mountain goats for the first time as they ran up and down peaks and made it look so easy.

I have really enjoyed getting the opportunity to be involved with the different departments of the Forest Service here and can’t wait to see what new experiences come in September!

During my time in the Umpqua, I have learned a lot about the nature of seed and seed collection. As something that I had never really given much thought to before, I have picked up on quite a few things regarding the matter. Though not extensive or something that can possibly be used across the board, I caught myself this last month making a mental rule book for the dos and don’ts of seed collection. Noting the things that nature had to teach me, I learned along the way what was easiest, the best, or sometimes the worst way to go about a process.

1. Never force seed. One thing that has stuck out to me the most, and should perhaps have been the most obvious idea, is that that seed will freely give itself to you when it is ready. It’s the whole purpose and the thing it wants to do the most – be released in its time of maturity. So when walking up to a plant, I now take note of how easily the seed gives itself up to me. Do I have to force it off of the plant? Or if I move too quick, accidentally bumping the plant, am I in trouble of losing my collection because it has sprung away at the smallest of encounters. If so, chances are I can pass go and collect my $200… after a trusty cut test of course.

// note – I wouldn’t necessarily think of berries and fruits in this way.

2. Following that thought, I move on to lesson number two: Be careful where you tread and grab. The number of times that I have lost the seed that I was reaching for simply because I moved too quick, missing what I was reaching for or accidentally bumped a plant with my leg… embarrassing. Springy seed pods, such as the Aquilegia formosa, will have you flying seed halfway across your work area with the smallest of movements. While not all seed is positioned for a great launching, those that are require patience and precise work – and maybe a little less shaking from drinking too much coffee in the morning.

3. Avoid spiderwebs. Not necessarily a hill I’m willing to die on, but I can think of a few reasons to avoid spiderwebs. First, because of spiders, duh. The last thing I want to do is reach for a handful of material and have a spider or its web in my hand. Yuck. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. No thanks. Second, webs catch things. Mostly bugs, but sometimes other things too like seeds. Here in the Umpqua, one of our most treated non-native invasive species has a wispy seed comparable to that of a dandelion. There have been a few times that I have noticed these fluffy seeds caught in a spider’s web. For me, collecting spider webs full of other, perhaps unfriendly seeds is not worth it so I avoid it altogether.

4. South facing vs. north facing. Thanks to rocking climbing I knew that any rock, bluff, or thing facing south would be hotter than the north, and as a result, knew that any seed facing south would be ready for harvesting first (ignoring elevation). This is because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the south side of any object will see the most hours of sunlight in a day.

5. Work in designated lines. When working in groups, it is important to assign work areas within your collection site. I have found that working in transects works best. This allows for all areas to be covered. No accidentally missing plants. No double-picking. You are responsible for an area – you know where you began, you know where you stopped, you know how much you’ve collected.

Honorable Mentions

Don’t be greedy. Take your percentage, leave the rest, and trust that Nature will provide everything you are meant to take.

Don’t cry over spilled seed. Seed spilled in the wild isn’t really lost or wasted. It’s where it was originally meant to be.

Patient work, not speedy. Small collection species are tedious and require a lot of effort. Don’t give up on collecting early because it’s uncomfortable. Pay your dues. Take the time to do the work. Tomorrow’s collection species will probably be easier.

Walk around. Find the beginning or the end of a population to begin your work. Don’t start in the middle and make yourself all confused. Additionally, you might find something new that you missed before.

-Casey Mills

Awn the subject of grasses I have very little to say because I know very little. Much of my work this past month has been IDing grasses during plant surveys. This is difficult because all grasses look the same to me. To aid in grass identification I made the following dichotomous key: 

1. Does it look like a brome?
   1. Yeah- 2
   1. No- 3
2. Is it a brome?
   1. Yeah- Bromus sp.
   1. No- Festuca sp.  
3. Could you use it to tickle someone? 
   1. Easily- Agrostis sp.
   1. Would be a challenge- 4
4. One seed per spikelet? 
   1. Yeah- Poa sp.
   1. No- 5
5. Hairy leaf margins?
   1. Yeah- Calamagrostis sp.
   1. No- 6
6. Does it grow in a wet area?
   1. Yeah- 7
   1. No- 14
7. Does it look kind of stringy?
   1. Yeah- 8
   1. No- 9
8. Seeds rotund?
   1. Yeah- Glyceria sp.
   1. No- Cinna latifolia  
9. Awns?
   1. Yeah- 10
   1. No- Phalaris arundinacea
10. Looks like a corndog?
    1. Yeah- 11
    1. No- 12
11. Describe the corndog
    1. Short and fat- Phleum pratense
    1. Long and skinny- Alopecurus aequalis
12. Poofy?
    1. Yeah- Dactylis glomerata
    1. No- 13
13. Droopy?
    1. Yeah- Deschampsia elongata
    1. No- Elymus glaucus
14. Bulbed?
    1. Yeah- Melica bulbosa
    1. No- 15
15. Spikelets on opposite sides of the stem?
    1. Yeah- 16
    1. No- 17
16. Bunchgrass?
    1. Yeah- Pseudoroegneria spicata
    1. No- Thinopyrum intermedium
17. Unkempt look?
    1. Yeah- Hordeum jubatum
    1. No- 18
18. Comb-like?
    1. Yeah- Agropyon cristatum
    1. No- 19
19. Poofy?
    1. Yeah- Koeleria macrantha
    1. No- Eriocoma nelsonii

When da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa he described the feeling of a divine presence guiding every brushstroke.¹ Making this key felt sort of the same way. 

In the key I did not key many genera down to species-level because I feel that keying a grass down to genus-level often times suffices. Anything else just feels pretentious. I especially feel this way with the genus “Bromus”. I am of the correct opinion that, in an effort to make our jobs easier, all bromes should be combined into one species (the unibrome). 

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is a noxious weed invasive in much of the Western United States. But, there are a number of brome “species” already native to this area. If we combined all the bromes into one species then cheatgrass would no longer be invasive and we will save a lot of money by no longer needing to invest time and resources on invasive management for this species. As an added benefit, mountain brome (Bromus sitchensis) is one of the target seed collection species for myself and my co-intern. We are having some difficulty locating suitable populations for this species, but if mountain brome and cheatgrass get combined into one species then we could just collect cheatgrass seeds. This would save us a lot of time because the cheatgrass is everywhere, even in disturbed environments where you would expect to see mainly invasive species. I suspect the reason plant taxonomists have not thought of these changes is because they are cowards. Unfortunately, there is not a Nobel Prize in biology.

1 I made this up

Our sylvan saunter sojourning for seeds has scattered us scouts though streamsides, summits, swamps, steppes and ski slopes. The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of driving up and down many a bumpy dirt road, hunting far-flung patches of plants and filling bag after bag with countless thousands of seeds. Our basement is starting to be overrun with an ever-growing tower of brown paper bags with eerie-sounding Latin labels – are we botanists or Hogwarts wizards?
Our wide-ranging adventures over two national forests mean that we’ve been camping almost every week this month to cover enough ground. After the first few days of eating only hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches, I shifted gears and decided that if I was going to do all this camp cooking this summer, I was going to do it right. I like a good camp-cooked meal as much as anyone, so it’s a good thing I have a job that makes me hike a lot.

With enough determination, one can cook (almost) anything over a campfire or a single-burner stove that can be made at home. On one such adventure, I spent an evening frying Monte Cristo sandwiches over a campfire – a delicious combination of ham and cheese between French toast, drizzled with pancake syrup. For dessert, I wrapped two Pillsbury crescent rolls around a stick, fried them over a fire, and filled the resulting tube with pudding and whipped cream for an eclair that would make any French chef proud. .I followed it up the next two nights with French toast and a recipe from the original 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook for Canned Salmon on Toast, essentially a glorified if archaic tuna salad. The recipe begins, “Dip slices of stale bread into smoking hot lard.” I’d call the result mediocre at best, with a pallid gray color unbecoming of salmon, but nothing tasted better after a long day of hiking (especially when I followed it with a round of French toast for dessert). The next week, I went out on a limb and tried a recipe for spicy potato and leek soup with shrimp that originally came out of an old fantasy book I read in middle school. It took near the entire evening to simmer over our campfire but boy, it sure tasted good! On the contrary, the recipe feeds about four people – being only Dan and myself, we awkwardly taped the pot lid closed and set it in the trunk of our jeep. The next morning, Dan was souped out, leaving me staring down a very large breakfast of seemingly endless shrimp. If you’re going to cook enough to have leftovers the next morning, make sure you have someone who will actually eat them!

This month, Josh and I got to do some more travelling outside our known areas in the Chugach. The first weekend in August we were able to do some backpacking in Denali. This 6 million acre park was originally created to protect wildlife, as wildlife biologist Adolf Murie studied the decline in Dall sheep. He has been called “Denali’s Wilderness Conscience”, as he spent 30 years rigorously studying ecological relationships, writing articles for popular conservation magazines, and favored restricted human development in the park. This mentality is still withheld today, as there is a landslide blocking the road roughly around mile 35, making the remaining 55 miles of road impossible to travel via vehicle. The woman who gave us a ride worked there a while back and she said there is some controversy on re-opening the road. Apparently it would be easier to construct an entirely new road, however, this completely goes against Adolf Murie’s advocacy. On the issue to improve the park road during his time, he wrote “my point of view will stress intruding and injuring the spirit of wilderness as little as possible, with sometimes a little inconvenience resulting. I would rather err in that direction.” There is also a surprisingly low amount of trails throughout the park, it is just literally 6 million acres for you to roam around. Although we went on a day that had mostly clear sky, you can only barely see Mt. Denali, which unfortunately is like going to the most acclaimed restaurant only to smell the food. The views were still great, and it was nice to see a new ecosystem. There is a shuttle bus around every 30 minutes that takes you to where the landslide is so you can see more of the park.

Another cool area we traveled to the second week of August was Cordova, one of the other districts of the Chugach National Forest. Although the town of Cordova is only 139 air miles away from this side of the Chugach, it is not connected to the main Alaskan road systems, making it only accessible by ferry. This 7 hour boat ride took us through Port Wells, between Glacier Island, then into Orca Bay. After speaking with the terrestrial crew leader, she advised for us to have a goal to make a grass and a Carex collection by the end of the week, I think this is because she wanted to have seeds for a wetter area and seeds for a drier area. It was exciting to get to a new place with different species that were more prevalent on our list. Cordova seemed as if it gets 2x the amount of rain Moose Pass does, and a lot of plants seemed to be behind in phenology, especially in the glacier area. Cordova also has way more bears than on the other side of the Chugach, and to be in on a trail anywhere out there, you need to be gun certified. At first I was rather bummed that we weren’t hiking as much, but then our 2nd to last day we saw a grizzly nearby our mapped Carex site. I had thought it was a car on the dirt road and then I saw the 4 legs moving into the forested area. After hiking most the Chugach without a bear encounter, I was rather scared. I turned some music on a portable speaker, clenched my bear spray tight and continued to pick Carex in the pouring rain.

Another interesting fact about Alaska in general is in 1964, a 9.2 magnitude megathrust earthquake caused ground fissures, collapsing structures, and tsunamis. This was caused by an oceanic plate sinking under a continental plate. In the Turnagain Arm area closer to Anchorage that Josh and I are more familiar with, the earthquake dropped this area around 8 feet. This is seen today by the ‘ghost tree forest’, from all the spruce that became water logged after 1964. However in Cordova, the ground was raised, causing new wetlands to emerge. Overall, it has been cool to learn about how this recent history has affected the ecosystem differently from the ground shifting to opposite elevations.

Overall, we have collected 1,562,248 seeds from 22 populations, consisting of 12 different species and 12 different locations. Other than a couple more collections of grass and maybe some Juncus, we should be finished and starting to process all of this for storage.

Collecting seeds in the rain is just as fun as I thought it would be! Even though August has been the wettest month in Alaska it has also been a month full of adventures.

During the first Week of August I got to Visit Denali National Park. There was a landslide that made it so you could only get to the 45th mile point. Unfortunately you can’t really see Mt. Denali from there but we still got to ride the bus all the up to where the landslide happened and see more of the park. We even got to see some Caribou!

On our next adventure our Mentor sent Katie and I on a ferry to Cordova, Alaska to collect seeds from another part of the Chugach National Forest that is only accessible by boat or plane. Cordova was very wet and rainy. It rained every day we were there except for our last day. We got to see one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen and even got to see tiny sea otters just hanging out in the water. Collecting seeds in the rain wasn’t very fun but all the things I got to see made up for getting so wet.

The bunkhouse that we live in is off of Kenai Lake. We used to have 17 people living in our bunkhouse and we would often have campfires by the lake. Most of the people we live with here at the bunkhouse were doing internships that ended in August and now there are only 6 of us here. The picture of me in my hammock below was taken at our last group campfire by the lake. The second photo is a really cool looking mushroom that I found outside of our office building. I thought it would be cool to share a close up photo of a cut test that Katie and I performed on Bluejoint reedgrass which is one of our smallest seeds that we have collected. The last picture below was taken in front of a beautiful sunset in Anchorage by my parents who came to Alaska to visit me.

This month Katie and I collected seeds from many of the sites that we had been monitoring for collection. In total we have collected from 22 populations a total of 1,562,248 seeds from 12 different species at 12 different locations.