Well it is time for my final blog.  This experience began in December 2010, when I applied for an internship via the Conservation and Land Management Program.   Krissa  contacted me to let me know that they had a few positions that I might be interested in.  She gave me a few project descriptions and allowed me to choose one of them.  One of the projects was at the  Palm Springs South Coast Field Office called the Dos Palmas Project.  The reason why I chose that project had to deal with the amount that I would be involved with.  All of the other projects sounded very specific and focus on a one or two major points, but the Dos Palmas Project seemed to have a lot going on with it. 

            I was living in South Carolina during that time, and I had to immediately move my life to the other side of the country to California.  The farthest west I had been was Tennessee, and I don’t really consider that the West, so I was very excited.  March 2nd was when my mentor offered me the job and asked if I could start on the 14th, so about a week after the acceptance I started working on the Dos Palmas project.  It was March and my mentor told me that she had already hired someone to replace her, and that the BLM was waiting for all of the paperwork to go through.  She was also trying to get another intern, so there would be a total of three people working on the project during the summer.

            My new mentor came and went, and so the assistant field manager became my mentor.  I and the other intern were the project leads for the Dos Palmas Project.  It was a challenge dealing with some of the partners on the project because we were so young , but eventually they realize we knew what we were talking about and respected us for that.  I forged new work relationships, and increased my network on a professional level and was very pleased to hear that many of them wanted to keep in contact even after I left. 

            Because I was taking on so much work, I needed a lot of training.  I attended several different training sessions, trainings that have helped me tremendously and trainings that I can use in the future.  NEPA, PFC, and the acronyms continue down the list (especially if you work with the BLM). 

            Despite some of the difficulties I encountered during my internship experience, I would not give up it for the world.  I have learned so much, made a lot of connections (both professionally and personal), and seen so much, that despite the difficulties, this has been a great experience.  I always wanted to get out of South Carolina, because I wanted to see what else was out there, I never expected to have the time of my life away from “home”. 

            Again, I am so grateful to have had this opportunity and would like to thank Krissa and Marian for all the hard work that they take care of, in order to make this internship possible for recent college graduates like myself.  I recommend applying to this program, it is a great way to get your foot through the door.  Good Luck and thanks again Chicago Botanic Garden.   

It’s been a busy several weeks since my last post, and I’ve gained many new skills even this far into the internship!

One of the possibly most useful jobs I’ve been trained on is how to complete Proper Functioning Condition (PFC) surveys. These surveys document the overall health of a landscape or allotment in order to evaluate past and future management strategies. We looked at both wetland/riparian health and grazing sites. These surveys investigate the vegetation community composition and health, the geology/structure, wildlife, and other aspects that are important to understand how the site is functioning. If an area show signs of an ecosystem in stress, such as if it has been accidentally overgrazed, it is important to know these conditions in order to adapt the current management strategy to encourage a sustainable future for that site. I can see using the techniques from PFCs for both future government work, or going into the environmental consulting industry, and I am very happy to have learned the methods.

I will begin collaboration with the Henderson, NV USGS and the Las Vegas BLM on a project to establish seed zones for restoration in the Mojave desert. I am very excited to contribute to this project and will be starting to collect plant tissue samples and seeds for genetic analysis and common garden studies.

The past month at the Alturas BLM field office has allowed me to delve into a variety of projects. These have included participating in pre-dawn marsh bird surveys at the Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, setting up a new line point intersect transect, scouting for seed collection targets, rare plant surveys and trying to teach myself ArcMap. My fellow intern Jaycee and I have been familiarizing ourselves with the Alturas BLM land. Our mentor Mike will point to a place on a map and tell us to get a feel for the dirt roads and where they go, of course looking for plants along the way. Names like the Tablelands, West Side Allotment, Muck Valley, South Ash Valley, Hogback Ridge and Conrad Ranch all have meaning to me now.

Mainly we have been learning the BLM special status plants and searching for them. The main threat to them is the juniper tree cutting which this office is carrying out. These cuts have the goal of both improving rangeland health and wildlife habitat. Fire suppression has allowed junipers to become overly dense and to encroach into areas of sagebrush steppe that were previously much more open and unpopulated by trees. The large machinery used for these cuts causes significant disturbance and the scene afterwards is reminiscent of the Lorax– tracks everywhere, battered stumps, and gigantic piles of trees (old growth trees are spared). However, hopefully this disturbance will benefit the ecosystem in the long run. The sensitive plants are particularly susceptible to disturbance in this process due to the habitat in which they occur. Most of the plants we have been searching for grow in bare patches that at first glance appear to be nearly void of  life. Upon close inspection, these areas are full of strange, minature plants. Many of them have a showy flower larger than the plant itself. Somehow, in the brief window between snowmelt and the heat of summer, they manage to extract what they need from exposed volcanic gravel, and are able to grow, flower, and produce seeds. Unfortunately, these gravel patches are perfect natural parking lots. What better place to park vehicles and stage machinery?  Habitats like these that naturally appear lifeless are often the easiest to destroy as we “turn the desert into the wasteland that we think it is”, as Gary Paul Nabhan puts it.

In fact, I can say that I personally participated in this process. About a month ago I did an ATV training course, which was located in one of these seemingly bare areas . Yesterday I happened to go back to where it was because my mentor found a rare species of penstemon there. Sure enough, as we were surveying the population, I found several of them in the ruts that we made during the ATV course! I’m not sure what, if anything, will be done about this, but at the very least we will go back and flag off the area where the penstemon is growing.

We have also been developing a target seed collectiong list for the Seeds Of Success program. The late blooming plants are in full glory and we have been excitedly collecting herbarium specimens. Some of the earlier blooming plants are now forming fleshy, green fruits that we will have to closely monitor to determine when they are ready for collecting. We picked apart what will likely be our first collection, the grass Poa secunda (which I described in a previous blog post) and looked at it under a microscope. It is done flowering and the fruit is still forming,  but it should be ready soon. I’m grateful to have a such a dynamic job that puts me in close contact with natural processes!

A patch of volcanic gravel-- the last place I expected to find rare plants!

Penstemon janishae in ATV tracks

Dimeresia howellii, a rare plant not much larger that a quarter

Joe Broberg

I am now in the middle of my fourth month at the Springs Preserve in Las Vegas, NV and things are starting to really pick up! For months my coworker and I have quietly witnessed the desert come to life.  The flowers, though they were sometimes few and far between, have come and gone.  Normally I would say that the best part is over, but not this season!  For me, a participant in the Seeds of Success program, spent flowers are an exciting sign.   It’s seed time here in the Mojave and I have been having a great time collecting native seed over the past couple weeks.  Most recently we made a collection of Fallugia paradoxa, the Apache Plume.  One of the most satisfying things is getting to pluck seed heads from a plant and say “Twenty! Forty! Sixty!…One Hundred!”  Some collections are slower than others and at times the work can seem tedious, but collections like the Fallugia help keep the work balanced.  I am looking forward to a little bit of scrambling over the next few weeks as we jump from one collection to another.  After a long, patient wait, it’s go time.

Allison Clark

Springs Preserve, Las Vegas, NV

In addition to the valuable career experience gained through the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Conservation and Land Management (CLM) Internship program, there are plenty of good times to be had as a CLM intern! Most everyone is familiar with technological tools such as GPSs (Global Positioning Systems) including Garmins and Tom-toms; and anyone who has ever used a map online such as Google maps or MapQuest has used GIS (Geographic Information System). These devices and programs which most people use for navigating while traveling or, for the adventurers, geocaching, have become essential tools for conservation and land management.

GIS (GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM). GIS is useful in many ways: producing maps that give directions to our destinations, tell distances from here to there,  show particular features of interest, document and re-locate particular features and sites (i.e., rare plant populations, trails, boundaries, etc.), just to name a few. But more and more, land managers are utilizing the spatial analysis capabilities of GIS to guide their management practices. As with all technology, it is only as useful as the user’s ability to use it. 🙂 And I’m definitely still learning (and re-learning when I haven’t performed a particular function for a while). It’s one thing to read a map, quite another to create it and to manipulate the tools of the software program to do what one needs it to do, and yet a different task to combine multiple layers providing spatial information relevant to a conservation or land management issue in a way that analyzes the data and informs management decisions.

Through trial and error, finding a way to accomplish what I need to do on ArcGIS

GPS (GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM). GPS has fast become a daily encounter as this technology is now built into the design of cars and into the programming of cell phones. What the average person may not know is that GPS has become to land managers what American Express has been for its cardholders: Don’t leave home (the office) without it. As long as it can receive a sufficient number of satellite signals and the batteries don’t go dead (a reason to always have a compass as well), GPS units are crucial for navigating in the field; I have found this to be especially true in the chaparral where the vegetation is too dense to walk through and too tall to see over…it’s very easy to get disoriented. I have used GPS to map populations of rare plants and invasives, sites of SOS seed collections, locations of potential variance projects, incidents of tresspasses, and a trail and its features (i.e., bridges, large Pacific madrone tree, restrooms, etc.). Within our BLM field office, GPS units are utilized by various employees for other map features according to their specialty: archeology, geology, engineering, recreation, wildlife biology, fuels management/firefighting, and land realty.

Searching for a signal...

Over the past few weeks we have completed a wide array of tasks including fire monitoring, learning how to use pesticide pumps, scouting and collecting seeds for the Seeds of Success program, monitoring sensitive plants, and mapping the intensity of the 7,500 acre topaz ranch estates fire right near the border of California and Nevada. The field season has started picking up and it is exciting to have more opportunities to explore the different facets of work at BLM. I’m also proud that my knowledge of Nevada’s flora is really starting to improve. I’m learning more and more about policies surrounding listed species. This has helped me to explore and learn more about the politics surrounding these listings. I’m looking forward to more field work and more camping, more animal sightings, listing to coyotes howl from my tent, perfecting my knowledge of the great basin plants, and more scenic views from sandy mountaintops.

The BLM Needles Field Office is know as the “Heart of the Mojave Desert”.  While my main project is associated with Mojave Fringe-toed Lizards I have had the opportunity to visit quite a few interesting places within the Field Office, and see a lot of the biological diversity that the Mojave Desert has to offer.  This blog post is going to be purely a photo-essay of some of my experiences during my internship so far:

I am definitely looking forward to the CLM Workshop out in Chicago next week, it will be a great opportunity to network and meet all of the other interns with CBG this year.

Jeff

BLM Needles Field Office

Our experience at the Klamath Falls FWS office is coming up on the one month mark following the transition from adult sucker sampling with GS, and a surprising amount has been packed into a relatively short time. As the last post (A Sucker for Suckers, cont.) mentioned, a lot of our effort has gone into sampling at a pond where about 200 juvenile shortnose and Lost River suckers were released a year ago after getting trapped in the canals that divert water from Upper Klamath Lake. Recapture rates with the fyke (hoop) nets set overnight have been slow so far, but we’re still testing different net placement strategies and detection techniques, including cast nets and a portable scanner. We have also dealt with an experiment in the lake to examine the effects of gravel substrate size on sucker egg development, and meanwhile at the office I have just begun working on a project to take detailed photos of juvenile sucker specimens that will later be analyzed along with x-rays to identify distinguishing body shape and skeletal characteristics for more accurate species differentiation.

At the Lower Klamath NWR sucker pond. We went beyond the sign.

Cast netting at the sucker pond. Didn't catch anything, but it looks nice.

Our main focus now is on the Modoc sucker, a smaller species that, while restricted to a fairly limited range of streams in southern Oregon and northern California, appears to have improved considerably since its listing with the ESA. Visual surveys are performed by spotlight late at night when the fish tend to be more out in the open and stationary. We found them in substantial numbers throughout the stream reaches that we have surveyed so far, and if this trend continues, a recommendation may be put forth to have the species downlisted to threatened.

In addition to the sucker work, we have performed egg-mass surveys for the Oregon spotted frog (a candidate species for listing that has been severely impacted by hydrologic changes and bullfrog invasions), and nest surveys for bald eagle chicks (as part of a five-year monitoring program required after its 2007 delisting).

Oregon spotted frog

Bald eagle nest (lower right) and parents (side by side at top).

With bull trout electrofishing, vernal pool plant surveys, river delta habitat mapping and bat detection equipment testing (among others) still ahead, this internship is turning out to be an incredible opportunity for sampling a wide array of projects, species, study areas and field methods – not to mention an exercise in organization and time-management.

Oh, and I have to include a compliment to the location:

Tommy Esson

USFWS, Klamath Falls, OR

This last week marked my fourth week as a botany intern in the small town of Lakeview, OR.  In that month I have experienced many new things. This is my first adventure out west to the mountains and sagebrush.  Coming from Iowa, the mountainous horizon is a welcomed change from the flat farmland that is present back home.  Learning about this new ecosystem has been very interesting but also challenging.

Conducting a botany clearance at Silver Lake

Already my crew has performed a botany clearance where junipers will be cleared in the future.  Now we have moved on to rare plant monitoring of all of the sites in the Lakeview Resource Area. We have seen many beautiful sights and I enjoy traveling to many different areas each week.

View from Table Rock while surveying rare plants

Most of the interns live in the BLM trailers which are located near the office, allowing us to ride our bikes to work.  With 10 interns here in various positions, there is always someone to hang out with and so many things to do!  I feel very lucky to have so many great people to work with.

A colorful Castilleja found hiding in the sagebrush

The next four months will certainly be an adventure and if the first month is any indication, it’s going to be a great summer!

Life is not always as it seems. However, if it seems like being a Wilderness Monitor in the Heart of the Mojave Desert would lead me to some awesome places, in this case life is exactly how it seems. The last comprehensive inventory for lands with wilderness characteristics in the Needles BLM office was 1979. I am providing an update to that inventory. Most recently I have been checking then-decided non-wilderness areas to determine if they have reverted to “wilderness”. On my travels I consider if an area is shaped primarily by the forces of nature, offers opportunities for solitude, and has potential for unconfined recreation.

My searches for wilderness have reinforced the fact that the Mojave is not as it seems to culture’s mind’s eye. Even in the hottest and sunniest hours of one of U.S.A.’s hottest and driest ecosystems the air is full of birdsong, bugsong, bees, nonchalance, and spiderwebs. The air is less full of pollen these days, but even cursory glances across the rocky ground reveal tiny Fabacea flowering (with no help from recent airborne water; it has been over a month since a sporadic rain fell over this vast landscape). As I nibble sweet Palo Verde seeds, I reason that some important lesson should be learned from this repeatedly demonstrated dedicated desert patience. The desert chooses life.