As the field season approaches so does spring! The infuriating yet familiar haze of Juniper pollen, the increase in temperatures and the beautiful greening of the landscape. All this has encouraged me to get outside and explore!

Over the last couple months I have had the opportunity of travelling all over the Southwest: St George, Phoenix, Moab, Carlsbad, Roswell, Las Cruces, and Taos. Through these travels I have: presented at a scientific conference, improved my skills in writing NEPA documents, increased my understanding of the (perhaps threatened) Endangered Species Act, enhanced my skills as an AIM instructor, as well as attended many fascinating interdisciplinary team discussions.

While these have been valuable learning experiences, above all I have treasured visiting such a variety exceptional natural areas. This last month has really crystallized my love of the desert and the mountains in this part of the world.

However, there is much office work still to be done! In preparation for the coming AIM field season I have been involved with planning sample designs, purchasing crew equipment, hiring crews and much more!

Hi, I’m Jonathon. I just began my internship at the Bureau of Land Management’s Ridgecrest field office a few weeks ago. The first few weeks have been a whirlwind of trainings, conference calls, and herbarium research, but also a fair amount of time spent out in the field, the Mojave Desert.

The first week at work, I was enlisted to help install a Common Garden research project that is being led by the US Geological Survey. The installation involved planting hundreds of labeled propagants of a perennial bunchgrass, Oryzopsis hymenoides, which is an important pioneer species in the Mojave. This project is intended to measure the relative suitability of several ecotypes of the species to different regions across the Mojave Desert. Hopefully, this research will help future restorations workers to identify the most appropriate population to take plant material from when planning an installation in a given area. This could improve the viability of the plants that are introduced for restoration, and reduce the losses that are often associated with using plant material in an area to which they are not as well-adapted. And, as the common gardens become established, similar work will be done with various other important plants for restoration projects. I really felt as though I got brought on board with the rest of the team responsible for the project, and I’m excited to have a part in doing this important work.
Not to mention I get to drive a really cool watering truck.

On top of that project, I’ve also been happy to get outside to survey riparian areas that may shelter populations of the federally listed Inyo Towhee, conduct grazing evaluation reports, scout for plants that we’ll be taking seed from for the SOS project in the coming weeks, and just to take in the beauty that the desert has to offer. I grew up near this area, but I’m still amazed with the stunning vistas that the Mojave has to offer every day I spend in the field.
Until next time,
-Jon

Ridgecrest Field Office, Bureau of Land Management

The Humboldt Bay Wallflower (Erysimum menziesii eurekensii) holding on in the dunes! This species is unique to the Humboldt bay dune system! photo credit: Jennifer Wheeler

Little pops of color in the dunes! photo credit: Jennifer Wheeler

Working on a dune transect, most likely counting Layia carnosa, also known as beach layia. photo credit: Jennifer Wheeler

Greetings from Arcata, CA! I’ve just finished up my first week at the BLM office here, and it has been a blast!

First off, just a mere two weeks ago my dad and I began the long trek from New Hampshire to California. Before this internship, I had never been west of the Mississippi, so it was a real treat to get to drive across the country!

My first week at the office mostly consisted of paperwork and meetings and getting through all of the necessary trainings. Then, I got the chance to be a judge at a local science fair, and saw some cool projects coming from the next generation of scientists!

Finally, near the end of the week, we got started on some dune surveys! Northern CA has massive dune systems stretching up & down its coastline. Like many other ecosystems, the dunes have been under attack from invasive species and human activity for quite some time. In recent years the BLM, along with other local organizations, has led an effort to restore them. Most of my botanical experiences so far have been forestry-related, so I’ll admit that the surveys have been challenging (shout out to my sponsor, Jennifer Wheeler, for being so patient!) but fascinating at the same time. The longer you look at the sand, more and more little dune flora pop out at you. And this year, because of all of the rain, the dune wildflowers are really putting on a show!

I’m looking forward to getting more settled into my position here – everyone at the office has been very friendly and welcoming, and more than happy to give this east-coast transplant advice! I am so grateful to have had this opportunity, and plan to learn as much as I possibly can about the BLM & the ecosystems out here before I go!

Madie

Recently, I have had the opportunity to attend a couple of training sessions.  The first was a NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) training right here in the Prineville office.  It was a 24 hour training spread out over three days.  Since I had no real experience with NEPA I took some pre-requisite courses on DOI learn and familiarized myself with the process.  After reading up on NEPA and taking some relatively hard learning assessments, the day of the course finally arrived.  We entered the conference room and were greeted by donuts, a ploy to keep us coming back every day.  The course was very informative and led by a wonderful instructor.  We learned about the fundamentals of NEPA, as well as applying what we learned to existing EA’s (Environmental Assessments) in the office.  Hopefully I will get the opportunity to put the training in practice by working on some easy NEPA stuff, to gain experience and simultaneously reduce the workload of my supervisors.  

Between the two trainings, I did some more golden eagle monitoring and learned the true value of patience.  To submit a negative observation of a nest (no eagle present on the nest), one must wait four hours to ensure that the nest is monitored for a sufficient period of time to avoid false negatives.  So, I hunkered down by my scope in the cold with a good book on owls and waited, and waited, and waited, until finally the four hours elapsed and I escaped back to my car and to the office.

Then after some office work, I headed east to Vale with a co-worker to attend a GeoBOB (Geographic Biotic Observations Database) training.  We took a mountainous route to get there, not my idea, and after about five hours we finally arrived in Ontario (Oregon, not Canada).  We stayed in a nice hotel there and had to adjust to Mountain Time, instead of Pacific Time.  We rested up and then left in the morning for the first day of the training.  Vale is a really small town that smells like manure and onions, unsurprisingly because they grow onions with manure.  They were especially hard hit by the winter, losing millions of dollars of onions due to snow collapsing many roofs.  The training was informative in the sense that it taught me some of the basics of GeoBOB, but was plagued by technical mishaps and other problems.  Both of the instructors (different people taught the class on the first and the second day) were teaching the class for the first time and therefore it did not go quite as smoothly as they intended.  However, it was nice to learn a new program and get out to Eastern Oregon, an area where I had not spent any time other than briefly driving through.  

Well lek season has started, but I don’t want to use up all of my material, so you will just have to wait until my next blog post to hear about the excitement of watching sage-grouse at leks.

Until next time.

Andrew    

Hello All,

I’m Charlotte, a repeat-CLM intern based in a new town in partnership with the NRCS in the little fishing town of Homer, AK (Discovery Channel’s “The Deadliest Catch” and “The Last Frontier”). I’ll be the acting biotech-ecologist for this office for the duration of the Nulato Hills mapping project. It’s a Soil Survey with vegetation data (which is where I’ll be helping), and it will be published on the Web Soil Survey for all to see, eventually.

This time of year we’re doing the spring thing: ramping up for field work by solving logistical puzzles, like how to get helicopter fuel delivered to a remote field camp. Even with spring excitement, there’s been some snags with budgeting that might cut our field tripping this season, adding work to the following seasons necessary to complete a larger area mapping project. So a data-crunching kind of summer it might turn out to be.

I’m happy to bring some prior experience to the project, having already worked with the NRCS as a seasonal and having Alaska flora-familiarity through a more agency-rounded internship based in Anchorage.

Still, there is a lot of reviewing to do! If anyone has a real knack for grasses (I’m looking at you, range botanists), I’m all ears.

Happy (almost) Spring!

Charlotte
Homer, Alaska

An expanse of open land, unimpeded in its darkness, spread out before me in all directions.

Although I missed out on a cross-country road trip, my midnight flight from O’Hare to Reno Tahoe Int’l. provided perspective to the scope and scale of the landscape I was entering.  Where ~80% of the state is public land, I felt incredibly excited to be embarking on a 9-month adventure with the BLM in Carson City, Nevada.

Before I knew it, I was settling into our shared housing, familiarizing myself with the area, and fast becoming friends with my awesome intern team.

View from our backyard, looking west, Carson Range

My first two weeks were filled with training, herbarium work, conservation plans, and preparations for the field season.  We completed a variety of training sessions including a lengthy ArcGIS marathon.  I learned about the local herbarium system and helped mount plant specimens from past years.  We started developing official conservation plan documents for sensitive Nevada plants and prepared for our five-day herbicide applicator course in Boise, ID at the end of the month.

Desk station, GIS training, accompanied by Intermountain Flora and apple

Just today we were able to get out in the field and complete a few tasks thanks to the warm dry weather.  We collected sections of Willow (Salix sp.) saplings and buried them in moist soil packets underground to elicit growth of new root systems.  We also used spades to remove invasive Thistles (Cirsium spp.) throughout the study plot area.

Field site, East of Carson City

Elsewhere, we are able to take advantage of the amazing outdoor recreation opportunities that Western Nevada has to provide! My first day in NV wasn’t complete until we hit the Reno Climbing Gym. I shredded my fingers.  Endless mountain bike and running trails are found within a mile of our house.  Last weekend we visited a place twenty minutes from Carson City that received 30 feet of snow this winter – Lake Tahoe. We explored the lakeside towns, hiked a beautiful ridge overlook, and have plans to go back tomorrow for skiing!

Running trails, Carson City

Example of Tahoe Snow

Eagle Rock overlook, West Lake Tahoe

As soon as the rain and snowfall from the region’s record-breaking winter allow, we’ll be exploring the Sierra Nevadas and Great Basin Desert further to work towards the goals of the BLM CCDO Botany Dept., Seeds of Success Program, and CLM Internship.

Carson City District Office – BLM

Connor Kotte

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

• Opening line from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin

I that this is an apt description of my first couple weeks of my internship with the Carson City BLM, and a decent way to relate that I do not own a camera.

This will be my third field position with a federal agency out West since graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, having sprayed weeds with the US Forest Service in Ely, NV and surveyed for post-fire vegetation with the US Geological Survey out of Boise, ID.

As such, I knew to expect all the preliminary paperwork and training that comes with starting with an agency, but it was still quite dry. Due to the (literally) wet weather and sketchy road conditions, the other CLM interns and I were somewhat limited in what we could do the, but we still had a nice variety.  That included office organization, helping to put together pesticide-use-proposals and biological assessments for vulnerable species, and attending a couple interagency/public meetings.

Somewhat predictably, the most fun and insightful moments were those working with plants in the herbaria we’ll be using and the one trip out to a field site. Through past experience in the Great Basin region, I have a passing familiarity with the native flora here, but due to a lack of practice and the quick-and-dirty method I used for rapid assessments in Boise, I’m finding that I have a ton to learn.

For my last field position, time was of the essence, so we were taught to identify plants either just to the genus (like “eriogonum spp.”) or ID the recognizable ones to their USDA PLANT database symbol. Those symbols are the first two letters of genus, first two letters of species, followed by a tiebreaking number if needed, so for example artimesia tridentata, or big sagebrush, is ARTR4. For whatever reason, I thought this was a pretty universal thing, but blurting out “deeso” (DESO2 = descurainia sophia, or tansy mustard) or “ivax” (IVAX = iva axillaris, or povertyweed) has gotten me blank/confused stares and comments. Learning how to actually key out plants will be extremely useful for me, so that if I ever come across a plant I don’t know off the top of my head, I’ll hopefully be able to be a little more specific/sensible.