The workshop in Chicago was a great experience, and I highly recommend going (if feasible) to all future CLM interns that are thinking about it. The first day we attended a symposium at the Chicago Botanic Garden called “Seed Sourcing for Restoration in a Changing Climate.” We were fortunate to be able to hear from recent academic researchers as well as professionals that work for various government agencies, including: Dr. Julie Etterson, University of Minnesota Duluth; Dr. Matt Horning, USDA Forest Service; Jack Pizzo, M.S., The Pizzo Group; Greg Houseal, program manager, Tallgrass Prairie Center; Peggy Olwell, plant conservation lead in the BLM.

Q & A session

At the end of the day, we had plenty of daylight left to explore the garden.

I also recommend eating at the garden’s cafe at least once during your stay. Their veggie burgers and grilled portabella mushroom salad are amazing options for the vegetarians out there. The brat and cheddar beef burger were also a favorite for the omnivores.

CLM interns hard at work in the classroom

We reviewed the protocol and methods for the SOS program, and even for an intern that does not work specifically with SOS, I enjoyed the training and hope to be able to be a part of the program in the future — perhaps a second internship! There was also a “crash course” in the botany of the West, which was extremely helpful. I look forward to going out into the field in my free time to practice plant identification.

practice with plant identification and seed collection

plant press demonstration

I would also like to point out that the amount of resources they provided all interns with was nothing short of impressive. We received two binders and also a flash drive, full of information that was organized to perfection. So many kudos go out to both Krissa and Rebecca for everything they do for us.

I am most grateful for all of the amazing people I had the chance to meet and get to know. The Wyoming interns and those close by are planning a camping trip / 4th of July get-together in Lander, and I cannot wait to see them again.  From the West to the East coast, and even all the way from Alaska, we are as diverse as the plants and wildlife we observe, while our passions for conservation and field work bring us all together.

a beautiful welcome back home to Wyoming

Cheers,

Valerie

Pinedale, Wyoming

It has been an eventful few weeks in Vernal, Utah. June brought sweltering heat and lots and lots of ripening fruits and seeds. We took a break from our seed collecting to monitor some rare, endemic cactus, Sclerocactus wetlandicus. This was our first big monitoring project of the season and though we learned a lot, it was a bit of a bummer. Many of last year’s healthy cactus were trampled, munched on, or just GONE! These are the sacrifices that are made when land is multi-use. Many of our plots were adjacent to drill pads, split by tire tracks, speckled with hoof prints and littered with invasives like cheat grass and Lapula.

Sclerocactus wetlandicus

When we weren’t monitoring empty quadrats, we were diving into seed collection. Levi and I are becoming more and more independent every day, scouting out populations, keeping an eye on phenology and collecting bags and bags of seeds. So far we’ve made 6 collections. We’ve collected Cymopterus bulbosus, Allium textile, Artemisia spinecens, Graiya spinosa, Cymopterus terebinthus and Lupinus pussilus. Timing is difficult, we’ve missed some opportunities and collected some too early. We are using a big white board to track all of our populations. June is a very busy time, everything seems to be ready all at the same time.

Allium textile umbels

This last week was the CLM Workshop at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and it was a stellar week. CLM interns are pretty rad people, if I do say so myself.We got to hear from inspiring professionals in the field like, Peggy Olwell, Plant Conservation Program Manager at the BLM, Krissa Skogen, Conservation Scientist and our very own CLM program manager, and Carol Dawson, Colorado’s State Botanist for the BLM. The botany of the West review was extremely helpful! We were able to explore the beautiful botanic gardens and get to know our peers and share our experiences thus far.

monitoring methods

Getting to know that dichotmous key

We networked and networked and networked some more. It was wonderful to see some real-life trees and chat with some like-minded people. Now we’re back in Vernal and we’re right back to work. This week will bring temperatures in the high 90s and lots more seeds. We’re going to check out some Erysimum capitatum, Asclepias cryptoceras and check on some Oenotheras for Krissa. Hope all my fellow interns are back safe at their various stations. Can’t wait to hear how everyone’s seasons unfold!

Peace,

Hannah

Hello from Needles CA!

This week we were welcomed back to the Mojave Desert from the beautiful Chicago Botanic Garden to temperatures above 120 degrees all week. Today it’s 125, so I was in the office today catching up on paperwork we put on hold for days just like this! For this blog post, I plan to catch you all up on what the Needles team has been up to for the past while. I had written a post for last month, but accidentally did not press “post”, so for this post I will combine both, starting from the oldest events to the most recent!

Early last month we were invited to attend a ceremony celebrating the designation of California’s three new National Monuments, Sand To Snow, Castle Mountains, and Mojave Trails. Mojave Trails National Monument alone covers 1.6 million acres of stunning desert landscape, encompassing parts of Route 66, a volcano, prime habitat for many of the desert’s flora and fauna, as well as historic Native American lands. Our office in Needles is excited to now be the caretakers of the Mojave Trails National Monument.

Route 66, with Amboy Crater barely visible in the background (look for the black flat topped mountain)

Having never been to such a ceremony I did not know what to expect. It was a great experience! Those indispensable to the effort to dedicate these lands spoke, from local government officials, state officials, local Native Americans who have been protecting and stewarding these lands for generations, to Sally Jewell, the US Secretary of the Interior. It was a unique experience and such a pleasure to meet Sally Jewell along with the other interns in our office. From our time speaking to her she seemed to be a compassionate woman with a deep love for nature.

Meeting Sally Jewell and the unveiling of the new monument signs!

The following day we led a group of SCA interns to Amboy Crater, an inactive volcano off of Route 66 which is now a part of the Mojave Trails Monument. With SCA we worked on seed collection of Creosote, Larrea tridentata. It was a new experience for them as none of them had done seed collections before! Due to our unusually rainy weather these past two months we have been needing to routinely check up on many populations of various species to see when they will be ready. Larrea tridentata is one of those species. We have since returned to Amboy three times to collect what we can that is ready, and  anticipate being able to hopefully finish the collection this week!

Amboy Crater surrounded by Larrea tridentata

Later that month, we met with Bighorn Sheep Biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to gain some monitoring and radio telemetry experience! This day was easily one of the most energy intensive days I have had thus far but it was so worth it! We broke up into teams to asses the populations in the Clark Mountains, and recorded a total of 88 sheep! This day called for intense hiking and mountain climbing to follow the sheep tracks, but was a valuable experience. I learned radio telemetry hands on, how to spot and distinguish sheep pellets, as well as gained a newfound appreciation for what my body was capable of (even if I was exhausted and wanted to get home by the end).

John teaching me radio telemetry! (He gave me permission to post this) 🙂

Top of Castle Mountain, highest peak in the Marble Mountains. We made it!

This past month has been a whirlwind of catching seed before the plants crisp up in this desert heat. We have made 15 collections so far, and anticipate having 20 by the end, if all goes to plan.

The next collection that we are looking forward to the most is the Joshua tree collection (Yucca brevifolia)!! We have gone out to our populations a few times to check on the seeds. The last time we went they were still unripe on the inside, but in time they will be good to go! That collection will be fun! We have apple picker sticks to pull the pods off the trees with, and tarps to catch anything that falls in the process so our seeds don’t touch the ground. Here is a picture of what the seeds looked like when we last checked, they’re such large pods!

As you can see, still very green and fleshy two weeks ago!

For the rest of this month we will be running around the desert trying to catch populations of Senna armata, Eschscholzia minutiflora, Krameria bicolor, Senegalia greggii, possibly Saliva dorrii, and finishing up our Larrea tridentata before everything out here dries up!

This past week I was in Chicago attending the CLM Workshop with many of you. It was such a great time meeting you all and getting to hear about your experiences all over the country. Hopefully we will be able to keep in touch!

My favorite lecture during the workshop was the hands on section of the “Measuring and Monitoring Plant Populations” session, where we were able to try out the techniques we had learned in class. The garden was spectacular and so well maintained! I am planning to post about the workshop in more detail very soon.

This is the start of my 5th week in Palm Springs, California. I drove here 860 miles in total from California’s North Coast in Humboldt County. I lived there for 3 years while attending Humboldt State University. The climate on the North Coast is nearly a constant 60 degrees F, with a humidity of around 80% so it always feels about 10 degrees warmer than it actually is. There are redwood trees and I was right by the ocean. I began my journey across California to my new home in the desert promptly after graduation. I packed up my car, and my two cats and two days later I was in a whole new world with a whole new climate that I was completely unfamiliar with. As I write this, today’s forecast predicts 122 F with the relative humidity at 14%. Of course Yesterday they said it was going to be 114 F and it got to at least 119 F, so we’ll see how hot it gets today!

My first desert sunrise!

My first day at the Palm Springs BLM office included a tour of the field site that we would be focusing on over the course of my 5 month internship. The place is located next to the Salton Sea and has an elevation of -226 feet below sea level, which makes the area hotter than Palm Springs who’s elevation is 479 feet above sea level. I will be working at Dos Palmas Oasis (elevation -210 feet below sea level) and part of it sits right on top of the famous San Andreas Fault. The landscape is dominated by Larrea tridentata or Creosote bush (which can live 1000 years!!!!), Allenrolfia occidentalis or Pickleweed, Atriplex lentiformis or Quailbush, and several tree species including two types of Misquote. I’m currently in the process of learning the rest of the species in the area. In addition to plant species, the Oasis is habitat for the endangered Desert pupfish that we will be monitoring and protecting and also offers critical habitat for an endangered Rail (which is a bird).

Driving to a field transect site at Dos Palmas

The waters of the Oasis are however in big trouble. Let’s go into some history, this area started off as a natural Oasis and a critical watering hole in the desert as Europeans passed by 150 years ago and of course also for the indigenous people who knew about the place and lived here since time immemorial. Things changed dramatically here in the 1930’s as construction began of the Coachella Canal, a 122 mile long unlined canal that brought water from the All American Canal that channels Colorado River water. The water now is brought across the desert in the Coachella Canal to farms in the Coachella valley. This unlined canal also inadvertently provided water all along its expanse via seepage through the ground and greatly increased the water at Dos Palmas as water here cannot penetrate the depths of the ground due to the presence of the San Andreas Fault. In 2006 a new concrete lined canal was dug parallel to the old canal and when the water was diverted into the new lined canal the water supply for Dos Palmas was cut off.

Three years after the water was diverted into the new canal and Dos Palmas was cut off from it’s water supply, mitigation efforts began where by some water from the canal was siphoned into the old unlined canal where it could once again flow through the ground to recharge the waters of the desert oasis. There are large(ish) seepage ponds in place for Dos Palmas as well as small ones specifically designed to be “sheep drinkers” for the desert big horned sheep that live in the adjacent mountains. Pipe lines were also put in place to feed even more water back into Dos Palmas and protect its endangered species. This was a wonderful improvement from nothing, but 1.3 years had passed with no canal water entering the system and 2. This new supply of water was next to nothing compared to what Dos Palmas once received from the canal for about 60 years.

Monitoring efforts began 6 years ago and continue today. They document the plants in the area and their response to the mitigation efforts. All in all quite a lot of Dos Palmas, particularity an area known as the San Andreas Oasis, is looking very sad. Plants are dead or dying, Oasis’s are dry or drying, and in response many wells have been dug to keep some of the Oasis filled. However not every Oasis has a well and some oasis’s are completely dry. Don’t get me wrong though, this area is still beautiful and the Oasis’s that have water are spectacular!

A water meter sits high and dry at the San Andreas Oasis

Here is a view of a healthy Oasis filled with water

Much of my job this summer aside from SOS (Seeds of Success) work, will be monitoring plant communities at Dos Palmas as well as monitoring the endangered species that call this place home. As long as I don’t step on a rattlesnake (and there are a lot of snakes out here!) and I stay hydrated I think I am going to continue enjoying this work as much as I have since I arrived. This internship is fantastic, I love working and I love the desert!!!!

Heading down to the Salton Sea to rescue endangered fish in an area that was rapidly drying up. Sitting on the water (those white dots) are American White Pelicans

When I moved from the mountains of Wyoming to the desert of Southeastern Arizona it was obvious things were going to be different.  The landscape, the culture, the flora/fauna, and especially the climate all greeted me with a stark contrast with what I had been used to.  With all that being different, one thing never wavered, and that was my love for the outdoors and biology.  I work with the BLM field office in Safford Arizona monitoring native fish and controlling invasive fish populations, which means getting down and dirty in the water and muck on a daily basis.  It’s awesome.  Recently, our field team went on our annual monitoring trip on the Gila River to assess the populations of the fish in there.  The section of the river we were in falls into the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, which restricts motor vehicle access, meaning that our typical protocol of driving to each site would not fly.  This restriction meant that in order to do the job we needed to travel the old school way: via water.  Roughly twenty miles of river and four monitoring sites greeted us over the course of three days.  At these sites we delineated areas based on habitat, electro-shocked to census various fish species, and used a device called a gravelometer to measure the size of the rocks on the river bottom.  The whole time I was in awe of how beautiful the landscape was and the fact that it was an incredible thought that this was ACTUALLY my job.  I mean, there’s not many jobs out there where one can say they get to be outside in gorgeous scenery doing a fulfilling job like conserving life on earth.  Although I am only a month into this job,  it has already taught me invaluable life lessons, such as the fact that no matter where you are there is a beauty in being outside and away from everything.  I can’t wait to see what the next four months have in store and where this opportunity takes me.  Until then though, cheers.

Wow, I cannot believe how quickly these five months have passed! But then again, when reflecting on the range of projects to which I was given the opportunity to contribute, and the amount that I have learned, it’s hard to believe that all of it occurred in just five months…

Throughout this internship, I have gained not only the concrete/technical skills—such as high desert plant identification, GIS capabilities, and vegetation monitoring methods, but also an appreciation for the diverse responsibilities and sustained efforts of land management.

I would describe myself as a “results-oriented” individual, that is, I find fulfillment in seeing the direct impacts of my work; therefore at times I found the array of simultaneous projects frustrating because I didn’t feel like I was focusing my efforts in a productive way. However, to future interns I would impart the following advice: Do not be intimidated, frustrated, or concerned if you feel that you are not able to see projects start to finish. If you are asked to work on several long term projects (as is the tendency of most land management initiatives…), it is important to understand why/to what end you are working on a particular project, but don’t necessarily expect “results.” Not only will you get the most out of your internship by staying open to and aware of new developments and projects, (even if you have four other tasks in the works) but these seemingly small contributions add up to the sustained, diverse efforts required of land management; that is, based on my very limited experience in the arena.

Thanks to CBG and the BLM in Carson City for this opportunity!

-Margaret

Well, last time I had written a post it was still snowy over here. There was just not a lot of field work going around. Now, it’s busier than ever! I have started to go out with others from the office to find my niche in the biological world on my free time.

First, I had the chance to work with the forester here in the Rawlins Field Office. We searched for a sensitive tree species that doesn’t normally grow around the area. We may have succeeded.

possible white bark pine

We tagged the trees for further examination later. Then the forester took us to a potential commercial site and we did plot surveys. I had never had the opportunity to use a laser to measure tree height in school, but glad I got to here. Makes it so much easier!

Second, I saw how reclamation is evaluated on oil and gas pads. We did dot surveys to see what plants were around the area, made sure there was bird cones on vents, and also made sure there were no critters in reservoirs.

Third, I went out with another CBG intern here in the field office. She’s working in the biology department doing Seeds of Success. I was glad to get out and learn some plants that are in the area. The wildflowers are in full bloom. I got some pics of the action.

penstemon?

milkvetch

Evening Primrose

Buckwheat

Lastly, I can put professional toad catcher on my resume. The field office volunteers with the Fish and Wildlife service to inventory the endangered Wyoming toad to see how the population is doing. A total of around 111 toads were found. Woot woot!

Medium size toad

Ready for release I’m sure

Adult female toad

I forgot to mention what I’ve actually been doing as a recreation intern, which encompasses replacing old BLM road signs with new ones, painting picnic tables, and monitoring. Here’s a few pics from the monitoring today

We get to replace these if they’re shot or broken

View of one of our campsites we monitor

Ladder over barbed wire fencing

Bridge to a trail on the Encampment River near another one of our campsites

That is all for now,

Rebecca (Rawlins Field Office)

Oh no… I’ve been too busy for an illustrated version of my adventures this time around. 🙁

In a nutshell, everything is drying up as we move into weeks with high temps in the 100s everyday. We’re collecting as much and as fast as we can, and spotting some later-blooming shrubs as well.

We’ve moved into the second half of our internship now. I’ve been getting to know our new office geologist and wildlife biologist, who have been able to teach me some interesting things about their duties and lines of work for the BLM. I’ve also busied myself with data entry battles while my fellow interns are at the CLM workshop in Chicago. My own training workshop is in a couple weeks in Montana and will be focused on AIM rangeland health methods.

And finally, I’ve been busy trying to figure out what I’ll be doing after this position ends in August. Luckily, I’ve been successful and now have a new job in place to look forward to!

Needles Field Office

While my work with US Fish and Wildlife has so far been primarily focused on fish and other animals, these past few weeks have involved plant surveys for a species called Applegate’s milkvetch (Astragalus applegatei). Applegate’s milkvetch is a small perennial plant in the pea family that grows close to the ground and has delicate pinkish-white flowers.

Applegate’s milkvetch

Applegate’s milkvetch is only found in the Klamath basin and due to development and other disturbance of its habitat, it only exists in small populations around the basin. The plant was federally listed as endangered in 1993. Until this last week, only four populations of Applegate’s milkvetch were known around Klamath Falls. Last week we surveyed one of these populations, which happens to be at the airport. The parade of fighter jets taking off and landing made for an exciting day of surveying.

A field we surveyed for Applegate’s milkvetch at the Klamath Falls airport.

Based on a reported sighting of Applegate’s milkvetch by some local botanists, we ventured to a nearby state park to look for the reported plants. Having expected at most a few hundred individuals, we were surprised when hours of crawling on all fours later we had found upwards of a thousand individual plants. Between our survey efforts last week and today (which exclude one of the largest areas of the park), we have found over 4,000 plants. This is likely one of the largest remaining populations of Applegate’s milkvetch, far exceeding the recovery plan’s call for 1,500 individuals. While continued monitoring will be required, the discovery of this population may assist in down-listing and potentially de-listing of Applegate’s milkvetch.

A small area at the state park where we surveyed for Applegate’s milkvetch. Each colored flag indicates an individual plant.