At the end of July we set off for a conference in beautiful Vancouver, BC. The conference was called Compassionate conservation. It was focused on bringing humane practices and ideas to the world of conservation. It had a variety of speakers from different backgrounds and from all over the world. I learned a lot about how we may bring a compassionate view of individuals in a field, which is mainly focused on the species as a whole.

Mt Hood (top left) and Mt Saint Helens (right) view from the flight to Vancouver

Our flight was delayed on the way back to Oregon due to the forest fires, which have sprung up all over the west coast. The smoke was so bad you could not see the airport, and we had to spend an hour circling above until we could land. When we arrived back to work we were made aware that the blue-green algae, a cyanobacteria, in the lake had bloomed and started producing toxins. At certain levels it can become harmful if ingested. So work in certain areas has become limited or we have taken the necessary precautions.

Most of the last month has been spent working on two projects. Both are taking place at the canal fish evaluation station run by the Bureau of Reclamation. The first project is focused on work regarding the requirements of the sucker fish recovery plan. At this canal station, thousands of fish get entrapped and are funneled through back into the lake. Part of the bureau’s job is to trap fish and collect data on any suckers caught. This year is the first year of the project to see if the fish caught can be held onto, kept alive, and then released as part of the captive propagation section of their recovery plan. If this is successful, we’ll see if it’s a viable option to continue in the future. Fish caught were kept in tanks until the end of the week, and then were transported to net pens set up on Pelican Bay. Once the fish are large enough, they will receive a PIT tag and be released.

Canal Fish Evaluation Station

The second project deals with estimating the potential frequency of sucker fish recirculation through the station. Chub and sculpin were used as surrogates for the project. These two species were chosen due to their similar characteristics to suckers and their abundance. Visual implant elastomer (VIE) tags were used to mark the fish. The tag is a colored liquid that goes under the skin, lasts a few months, and can be readily seen under black light. Recaptured fish can then be used to estimate recirculation rates through the station.

Chubs tagged using visual implant elastomers

Hello again my fellow CLM interns and CLM blog readers!  My internship is now well-over halfway through, bringing both excitement to move on to new places and new things and slight dread regarding moving away from the friendships I’ve made and fun I’ve had in Boise.  I think that my last 2 posts efficiently covered the seed collections and habitat assessments that we have been doing over the past 3 months, so I shall instead write about other things we have had the opportunity to experience/help out with.

Given Boise, Idaho’s 5 hour proximity to Bend, Oregon, we were able to personally deliver our last batch of seeds to the Bend Seed Extractory.  The assistant manager there,  Sarah, was kind enough to give us a tour of the facility and even demonstrate some of the equipment used for seed cleaning and separation.  It amazes me how few people work at the extractory, given the quantities of seed they must process.  Many of the collections they receive are somewhat new to them, so they must use the process of trial and error to determine the best combination of equipment and settings to extract, separate, and clean the seeds.  The top photo is of an anti-gravity machine that pumps air up from the bottom like an air hockey table to elevate the seeds and then shakes back and forth at a slight angle to separate heavier and lighter materials.  The seeds are slowly pushed off the end of the table, and the adjustable wooden wedges are used to direct the different weight classes into different bins.  Pretty cool!

Anti-Gravity Seed Separation Machine

Gradient of pure seeds at the top and unwanted material at the bottom

Samples of seed collections from our field office last summer

Another day was spent accompanying some BLM employees from the Washington D.C. office and Idaho State office on a tour of the Intermountain Bird Observatory/Research Station.  We helped the researchers check their mist nets for songbirds every 30 minutes during their 5 hours after sunrise shift.  The birds are all identified, tagged if they aren’t already, measured, aged, and inspected for parasites and overall health.  Everything is then recorded, and the birds are set free to go about their daily activities.

Colorful individual ready for release

Too content to fly away

One of the many mist nets in the area

Thanks for reading!

Dan King

BLM – Four Rivers Field Office – Boise, ID

As the month of August began, the heat set in and the fires ignited! This past month has been both busy and enjoyable for me, with many more memories to add to my BLM-Buffalo experience. I would say that the bulk of this month has been spent seed collecting for me personally. I have collected and shipped a total of 9 populations with 5 more on the way! To be honest, I would have liked to have collected a few more populations by this time of year, but the weather continues to be unpredictable and sometimes uncooperative, which has definitely been a learning experience in being flexible and compromising. One of my favorite collections I did though was of Achillea millefolium, or Western Yarrow. By chance, I had found this (huge!!) population of yarrow on a small patch of BLM just within the property of a very friendly rancher. Better yet, this rancher has a herd of awesome goats that he is using to help curtail another unwanted plant species on his property. So of course, coming out to monitor the yarrow and then collect it, we were always welcomed by the goats that would come to the truck looking for some pets, hugs and food 😛

Saying hello to our goat friends at my collection site for Achillea millefolium!

Another seed collection site that I have been enjoying this past month is called Outlaw Cave, on the southern end of my office’s boundaries. This area is both beautiful and historically interesting, as it is the known as one of the hiding places of famous Wild West outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is quite a picturesque drive to get to this area, as you drive along the “Red Wall” of Wyoming and among many beautiful horse and cattle ranches. I have three seed populations in this area that are just starting to ripen late in the season for collection. Unfortunately, with all of the fires that have been raging in the West as of late, the views have been rather hazy and the air smoky, even though there are no serious fires in this immediate area. This has made collecting a little more challenging, as the air is extremely dry and hot, making hydration crucial for the long days in the field. Even so, it is still an breath-taking site to collect at, and I am thankful to have the opportunity to work within such awesome, rugged scenery!

Outlaw Cave- the most beautiful part of the office’s BLM land!

Jade, the horse whisperer, at Red Wall.

In other news, it appears that collection season is slowly winding down. I can’t believe that within just two weeks it will be September and fall and cooler weather will start setting in. I expect that my work will begin transferring to more office work as I begin mapping my population sites on GIS, inputting collection data onto the computer and preparing my voucher specimens. This internship has certainly flown by quickly, and I am anxious to figure out my next steps and plans for the months ahead!

-Katie

This marks the end of my internship with USGS Henderson in the Mojave Desert. It has been a fantastic experience, and I have learned so much! It has been a pleasure to work with amazing researchers and contribute to fascinating and relevant research! Working on a study related to Desert Tortoise, Gopherus Agassizii, has been very eye-opening. Before this internship, I had not worked with an endangered species, and I was fascinated to learn more about the regulations and legislation in place to protect endangered species!

Most significantly, I have learned an entirely new flora, informed by the Jepson Manual, as well as my mentors and other botanists in the area. From Phacelia to Cryptantha and Sphaeralcea to Oenothera, I have expanded my botanical knowledge considerably! It was a great experience to use a new flora (the Jepson Manual) and to think about different ways to identify plants (i.e. examining at Cryptantha “nutlets” for species identification, using bracts for Ephedra ID, etc.). I enjoyed exploring and discovering small portions of the Mojave, and the experience has inspired me to explore the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts as well.

In addition to plant identification, I learned some new techniques for data analysis. I learned that R is an extremely powerful analysis tool, if you know how to use it! I took some time to read up on R code and packages, which was very helpful. While I didn’t end up using it for this internship, I certainly plan to use it in the future!

After performing some preliminary analyses on our juvenile Desert Tortoise vegetation survey, I began to consider some important concepts. For example, species are often clumped by “native” vs “nonnative” species. However, these categories, while useful in certain circumstances, can be misleading. For example, with regard to nutrition, studies have shown some nonnative species to be detrimental to tortoise health and others to be beneficial. Bromus rubens has been shown to be of poor nutritional quality for tortoises, while Erodium cicutarium is actually quite nutritious, especially for juvenile tortoises. While these are both incredibly abundant nonnative species, they offer completely opposite nutritional characteristics. Discoveries such as these demand a more comprehensive set of questions than simply: “how do native vs. nonnative plants compare in terms of nutrition?” Instead, one must take into account various factors, including origin, abundance, caloric value, mineral concentrations, etc. These questions help drive truly innovative studies.

I also gained more GIS experience throughout my internship. I had the opportunity to explore the multitude of functions provided by ArcMap to accomplish tasks such as map ping our vegetation sampling effort and selecting candidate sites for our oil well vegetation project. Incidentally, I have also learned more about oil well production on the Colorado Plateau than I ever expected to know!!  Here’s a photo of a mesa nearby our field sites.

My internship exceeded my expectations, and I am very happy to have had the experience. I hope to work in this area again in the future! I am sad to leave the Mojave, but I’m sure I will be back again.

Thanks to everyone who played a role in my internship experience, particularly my mentors!

Cheers!
Daniel

Today is my last day working on the Stanislaus. I have gotten used to living my life in pine forest and will miss it. After growing up in the darker fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, the smell of the sun on the ponderosa and jeffery bark is delightful!

In just over two weeks I will be moving from a vacation town of several hundred folks (Long Barn, CA) to a major metropolitan city (Madrid, Spain). I doubt my fellow Fulbright scholars will understand what it is like to drive a field vehicle two hours into a burned area on washed out roads, clearing fallen saplings out of the roadway all the while, in order to hike steep slopes and end up covered in charcoal. And I very much doubt they will understand how much fun it is! Who knows, there will be another ecologist among them…

Throughout the season I have had the opportunity to participate in various projects. I began monitoring populations of several sensitive species post Rim Fire (2013), moved on to protecting sensitive orchids on rangeland, and, after acting as the botanist for several wetland delineations in restoration sites, I spent several months surveyed reforestation units for sensitive Clarkia and noxious weeds. While my past experience has been mostly data collection with an academic purpose, this summer has been steeped in application. It has at once been grounding (to put theory into practice), and a little tedious (to cover such a large burned area with our survey crew).

However, each project offered its own opportunity for learning. In the surveys for weeds and sensitive species I learned GIS (from scratch!!), and became very adept at mapping populations in rough terrain. We made countless maps, outlined each population we encountered, and updated data from previous years. During the wetland delineations I learned to determine the boundary within a gradient of plant communities, and how to interpret the wetland status of different species. Working with an Americorps crew to construct cages in order to protect the mountain lady slipper orchid I considered my position on conservation/restoration. Questions like: How can we be the most effective in protecting large, complex, systems? What is the value of a man-made ecosystem? A “traditional”, “untouched” ecosystem? A “novel” ecosystem including invasives? Honestly, I’m still looking for answers to those questions, and I think that this momentum will lead me to my next opportunity.

Alright, that’s all for now. A warm farewell to all and a hearty thanks to Krissa and Rebecca for making this program possible.

Cheers,

Emily

Clarkia australis

Lush Claytonia after the burn

A brushy drainage greening up after fire

Summer is drawing to a close here in NorCal but I’m happy to report that I’ve received an extension and will be in Arcata until October. As much as I’ve explored over the past 5 months, there is still so much more to see! Not to mention learn!

Summer in California is synonymous with wildfire and this year has been no exception. As I write this, over 60 fires are raging across the state, thousands of acres have burned, hundreds of miles of dozer line has been cut into the wilderness, and millions of seeds will soon be needed for rehabilitation. Californian wilderness is highly fire adapted with many species thriving in the space created after a blaze, however too many fires in too short of a time period can cause biodiversity loss and dramatically increase the susceptibility of the habitat to invasion from non-native plant species. The time immediately following a fire can therefore be a critical window to perform rehabilitation with native species, and the National Seed Strategy for rehabilitation and restoration, launched by the BLM this week, aims to address this specifically by having the right seed available when necessary so it can be on the ground as soon as possible.

I have spend the last month out and about for SOS, collecting the seed from native species that may be used in these future rehabilitation projects. I can’t begin to tell you how much satisfaction this has brought me, knowing that I am directly contributing to better rehabilitation. It was also an incredible “from the ground up” learning experience for me, watching the phenology of a plant from start to finish, learning the morphology at each stage, and waiting for that perfect moment to pluck the fruit from the plant.

I have ended my internship a bit early in order to pursue my master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. I recently moved to Oahu, and am loving it so far. Here’s a little summary of my summer in the Panoche Hills:

This field season I had the opportunity to investigate grasshopper and lizard ecology in the central valley region of Panoche, California. I examined how two different grasshopper species, Odaleonotus enigma and Trimerotropis pallidpennis, are distributed across the Panoche landscape. I designed an original protocol for counting and collecting grasshoppers. I also reviewed some important literature to gain a deeper understanding of grasshopper characteristics, abundance, and distribution. While I did not ultimately work on incorporating lizard ecology into my study, this data may be used to eventually discover the food preference of endangered blunt nose leopard lizards in Panoche. It may also be used in a separate note for a journal.

My office worked closely with The Ecoblender lab from York University. The lab reviewed my protocol. I needed to make corrections, but it was a straightforward protocol for a straightforward task. There were three areas where leopard lizards were previously identified in Panoche. I used lat/long coordinates to establish three separate zones where I would count and sample. I initially used a transect method, but it proved to be very misleading in the data. For example, both species of grasshopper are highly gregarious. Having near zero counts within the transect did not represent the grasshopper population as a whole. So, I began to do something I called a “zone sweep.” I completed a zone sweep at each site twice a week.

Dr. Lortie (ecoblender) suggested that I was actually using a belt transect method. From there, I was able to establish an area and calculated grasshopper density per square meter. I also noticed a few other protocols where density was used, further corroborating my decision to use density instead of raw numbers. I comprised two tables. One table has raw count numbers, and the other has calculated density for each belt transect. Both can be used for further statistical testing using excel or even the statistical program “R.” I also ran an analysis of variance several times this season. Each time I had more data to use. However, no statistically significant results were found. The P value was 0.121.

I had a lot of time to myself this summer in an isolated place. I feel I contributed in a small way to a much larger picture at the BLM. The federal experience is invaluable to me, and will propel me in my career as an entomologist. I’m very thankful for my mentors. I look forward to the end result of this project, even if I am only involved from a distance!

Aloha Everyone!

Jennifer Michalski
BLM Hollister Office

Lilium canadense at Catoctin Mountain Park

My time as a CLM intern at the C&O Canal and Catoctin Mountain Park is sadly coming to an end.  I have been in Maryland since early April and have had a great time getting to know the area on a couple different levels.

I fount RTE Oenothera argillicola (shale-barren primrose) at the Paw Paw Tunnel outside of Cumberland, MD

I’ve had the opportunity to travel up and down the Potomac River and was able to experience first hand how it has shaped its landscape socially and physically.  The Canal runs from very rural and mountainous Cumberland, Maryland to the unquestionably urban coastal plain of Washington DC.  These two sides of the park are as different as night and day socially and biologically.  I was very impressed by the collaborative management efforts the C&O maintained to help address all of the needs of this diverse park.

Just a few buddies hanging out by the C&O Canal!

As far as the things I’ve gained from this experience the list is long.  On a professional level I was able to gain experience creating a fieldwork schedule and managing people, tasks and time.  I attended a week long plant ID class, two GIS workshops and was able to work with GPS hardware and ArcMap on a daily basis, enabling me to expand my knowledge and use my skills.  I had the overarching project of updating the locations of rare, threatened and endangered plants but also had opportunity to create my own tasks and was able to focus on visitor outreach, volunteer coordination and environmental education in addition to surveying for RTEs.  Most importantly I was able to network and interact with professionals in the National Park Service. The skills I gained from this CLM internship and the CLM internship I had last year with the BLM in Lander, Wyoming gave me the skills I needed to move along on my career path.  I’ll be attending University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in September to begin a MS in Natural Resources program and have my experience as a CLM intern to thank for the experience!

Working hard or hardly working?!?

Working in this area was amazing, but so was living in it!  Living at Catoctin Mountain Park in Thurmont, MD offers little in terms of socializing but I was relatively close to many exciting places and I was lucky enough to have 4 great roommates!  I was able to visit a few  National Historic Battlefields (Gettysburg, Monocacy, Antietam) and learned about the history of the area,  visit a number of charming little towns (Frederick, MD, Shepherdstown WV, Berkely Springs, WV) and fall in love with small town America but was just a short drive from a few major cities (Washington DC, Baltimore, MD, Pittsburgh, PA) if I needed an urban fix.  I was lived about 3 miles from the Appalachian Trail, so I got a good amount of hiking and camping in too!

Fringe benefits

Great Falls, MD. Just 10 miles from Washington DC!

I’d like to thank everyone at Catoctin Mountain Park, the C&O Canal National Historical Park and the Chicago Botanic Garden for making this experience great for me!

#IFOUNDMYPARK

The Paw Paw Bends, outside of Cumberland, MD

It’s been a while since my last post…Oops! I honestly have no idea how the time went by so fast. I want to share all of what I’ve been up to in the past two months, but there’s just too much to be able to give a full rundown –  ESR Weed mapping, Rare plant monitoring, Land Health Assessments, assisting our Great Basin Institute colleagues, and plenty of trainings!

The majority of my time has been spent mapping weeds on land that has burned within the last 3 years as a first step to rehabilitating this land. Gotta know where the invasions are before you treat them! On this project, one thought that keeps on coming up is “How are they going to treat all these weeds?” Many of the sites that we visit are very steep and difficult to access for mapping – let alone with a backpack sprayer! In talking to my mentor about this he mentioned a beetle that can be used as a bio-control for Dalmation Toadflax and hopefully in the future using a fungus known as black fingers of death (yes, that really is the common name), or Pyrenophora semeniperda, to control cheatgrass once it has been federally approved.

Weed mapping above the Columbia.

One of my highlights from the past few months was attending a training for Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health in Rock Springs, WY. This is an assessment method used here in Wenatchee, and many other BLM offices, to get a quick snapshot of how an area is doing. The current state of the area is comparing meticulously researched reference conditions using 17 indicators as a framework for this report card, so to speak. I’ve been fascinated by how we define and measure “ecosystem health” for a while now and this training showed me one method being nationally used. In addition, I got to go out in the field with the inter-disciplinary team from the Wenatchee Field Office and see this method put into practice.

(Awesome side-note: I’m pretty sure this training also helped me land my next job! Shout out to Erik Ellis for letting me go.)

Field deliberations over the 17 indicators. Moderately departed from reference conditions? Maybe…

Weekends here have been pretty hot and smokey from all the fires. (Apparently now there are something like 30 fires going at once in the state of Washington!) I’ve managed to have some pretty good ones though, namely hiking through the Enchantments and attending the Washington Native Plant Society study weekend near Mt. Baker.

The Enchantments! Prusik Peak in the background.

Wonderfully wet Mountain Ash. It was nice and cool on the west-side.