San Diego County is the most botanically diverse area in the U.S. with nearly 2,000 species, many of which are endemic. The county has the coast to the West, the desert to the East, and is bisected from North to South by the Peninsular Ranges. The elevation ranges from sea level to over six thousand feet. This varied landscape allows for an exceptionally high level of plant diversity.
The desert transition habitat is found down the east side of the Peninsular Ranges and this was the area where we went last week. The weather forecast looked ominous, but we were optimistic. To get to our site, we had to drive up and over the Cuyamaca Mountains and out into the lower elevations beyond.
The drive over the Cuyamucas was relatively uneventful, with very little rain. When we finally reached our site we saw a mix of cacti, shrubs and huge granite boulders. It was freezing cold and very windy. At certain points the wind became so strong it was difficult to open the truck doors to identify plants. Despite the rough conditions, it was a beautiful place to explore. We saw Desert Apricot (Prunus fremontii), Golden Gooseberry ( Ribes quercetorum), and Grape-Soda Lupine (Lupinus excubitus) in bloom.
As the day wore on the weather only got worse. When we tried to collect a sample of Apricot Mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) the rain turned to hail and we decided to admit defeat for the day. On the drive back up and over the Cuyamucas the hail turned to snow! It was so much fun to watch everything turn white throughout the course of our drive. We followed a snow plow most of the way down the mountain. (I never would have imagined experiencing something like that in Southern California.) As we dropped in elevation, the snow slowly changed back into rain and everything turned green again. It was odd to realize that we had only been a half an hour away from the ocean.
There are not many places where you can experience the ocean, the snow, and the desert within a couple hours. San Diego is truly a remarkable place, and I couldn’t ask for a better area to study plant diversity.
-Lauren

What a week this has been.  Never in my life did I expect to say this, but I am now a current resident of Las Vegas, Nevada.  A long ways away from the Redwood coast that I called home for four and a half years, I have been thrown into a completely new world.  I have traveled from a small town to a huge one; from 50 inches of rain a year to this place that gets 4; from a Redwood forest to the desert.  I cannot think of two places that are more dissimilar.  And yet, I have been able to find beauty in both.

Upon arriving in Las Vegas last week I could not see beyond the strip malls, housing developments, thousands of people, and casino lights.  The traffic stressed me out and I felt like turning my car around and heading right back to Arcata, CA from where I recently graduated.  I couldn’t imagine finding peace is such a giant city, and yet it seems I have.

I began work at the Springs Preserve on Monday and all of my fears about living here have slowly dissolved.  The Springs Preserve is located in the middle of the city, a 180-acre refuge for wildlife and native plants.  It has only been open to the public for 5 years but has so much to offer.  With a focus on sustainable living, the Springs Preserve features museums, a botanic garden, and an interpretive trail through a wetland habitat.  Though the majority of my internship will not be spent working on site at the Springs Preserve, I will have multiple opportunities to teach classes and put on demonstrations for the schools and families that visit.  Every employee I have met has such a passion for education, conservation, and sustainable living; I am excited to join the team.

During my internship I will primarily be working for the Seeds of Success Program with the local BLM office.  Due to a lack of rain, I have yet to begin training for that and am eager to get out in the field.  My first few days, however, have been great.  This weekend I will be participating in the Springs Preserve’s Cactus Salvage Program and am very much looking forward to getting my hands dirty.  The Springs Preserve has partnered with local developers to salvage cacti from lands to be developed, which will then be potted and sold to local residents.  All profits from the cactus sale will fund grants to local elementary school teachers for programs focused on botany, recycling, sustainable living, and water conservation, among other topics.

During preparation for the Cactus Salvage, I had my first real dose of the desert.  From a distance it looks pretty lifeless but I should know by now that that is never the case.  Up close, it really is beautiful.  Here are a couple shots of the cacti that we will be working with this weekend.

Cottontop cactus (Echinocactus polycephalus)

Silver Cholla (Opuntia echinocarpa)

Hedgehog cactus (Echinocactus engelmannii)

My first week in Las Vegas has been wonderful.  I have been challenged and inspired by this new landscape and know that I have so much to learn about my new home.  I am looking forward to seeing how this internship will evolve with the coming field season and can’t wait for these next steps!

Everyone do a little rain dance for those of us in Las Vegas!

Allison Clark

CLM Intern: Springs Preserve, Las Vegas, Nevada

The time will come when winter will ask what you were doing all summer” –Henry Clay

Although Clay was referring to a long forgotten era when surviving the winter was a direct correlation to how much food a farm produced in the summer, taken broadly it is an appropriate aphorism of my time as a CLM intern. Just as early agrarians invested in the summer to prepare them for the future, through the CLM program I have garnered a hoard of skills and experiences towards that end. I either learned or enhanced my skills in:

*GIS processing, changing tires, patience
*Cruising timber, FORVIS stand inventory, getting sap out of clothes
*Range monitoring, fire rehab monitoring, staying hydrated
*Salt desert scrub plant id, sagebrush steppe plant id, subalpine conifer id, walking
*Remote sensing, DOQ interpretation, patience
*Class III cultural survey, NHPA of 1966, SHPOs and NRHP, celebrating the little things
*Right-of-way compliance, invasive plant id, appreciation of the Grateful Dead
*Wild horse trapping, public inquiry, diplomatic response
*RMP planning, AMS vegetation description, patience

What I will miss most about the job are the professional relationships I’ve developed with coworkers.
What I will miss most about Carson City is being a stone’s throw from the mountains and my favorite lunch spot on the Carson River. Given these positives, I will indubitably recall my desert and mountain solitaire with nostalgia.

Saying goodbye is never easy.  Despite developing a healthy, loving relationship with the chaparral over the last seven months, we’re currently taking a break.  For the past month I’ve left behind my beloved field work behind for long hours inside the office.  Saying that sitting leaves me antsy is an understatement.  I long to frolic in the chaparral once more!

Although cubicle days can be tough and data entry an undeniably necessary evil, it does have its perks.   Working on a multitude of education and outreach projects for Pine Hill Preserve is a great outlet for sharing my enthusiasm.  Throughout the field season we had a handful of regular student volunteers, but our current efforts aim at getting many more excited about rare plants, conservation, and BLM.  A large part of which has been tabling at local career fairs.  This week’s event alone had over 1,400 students!  I love hearing students whose initial questions were “The BL-who? Chapara-what?! ” leave enthusiastic about conservation.  Hopefully we’ve inspired a new botanist or two!

 We’ve also been working hard to develop new education and outreach materials for the Preserve.  Most recently this has included brainstorming for our booth at the upcoming Girl Scouts’ 100th anniversary celebration.  Ten thousand girl scouts are expected!  My days are filled with color book pages, display boards, and bright photos– not to mention the immeasurable challenging of distilling down chaparral, the preserve, and rare plants to an appropriate level. How do you explain gabbro soil intrusion endemic chaparral plants to first graders!?

The crayons are calling! over and out.

Sophia Weinmann

CLM Intern: El Dorado Hills, CA

It’s been a couple months since my last post (I got my last alert while I was on Christmas vacation) and work is progressing smoothly in the state office. I am still absorbed in my native pollinator project, though the exact project goals and findings are starting to solidify. For those of you who haven’t been keeping track, I’ve been conducting an in-depth literature review trying to determine what is known about pollinators in Colorado, specifically how far they can fly and how far they are likely to fly between their nests and the plants they forage at. The reason I’m doing this relates back to rare and endangered plants. When protecting a plant population, it is imperative that you take this plant’s pollinators into account. If you only protect the plants themselves, and bulldoze everything around them, it’s unlikely that enough bees will survive to keep pollinating the plants and maintaining the population. This is pretty intuitive. What’s not so obvious is how much habitat you should protect around the plant population, which is where my research fits in.

When it comes down to it, these “buffer” distances are also affected by politics. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s mission is to “conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats,” (mission statement on their website) which means that they are in charge of listing species under the ESA and then protecting them as well as they can. In turn, it is in their best interest to leave lots and lots of space around plant populations for pollinator habitat. Their estimates are based on science, but when there is not very much information available, it is best for the FWS to err on the side of more protection, and thus bigger buffer distances. The BLM, on the other hand, has a multi-use mandate. While it is important to (and required of) the Bureau to adequately protect endangered and threatened species, it is also part of our job to lease land to energy development and grazing interests. When large buffers are placed around plant populations, it significantly increases the amount of work that these interests must do in the form of surveys and protective measures, a fact that they’re not always happy about. So, it comes back to balance. We need to protect these species, but we don’t want to regulate these development companies out of business. Not only do they provide domestic energy and jobs, they also pay the government a lot of money for this privilege, helping to make the BLM a profitable government agency year after year.

My job in all this is to ferret out the data that matters. Rather than reading the key reviews and drawing conclusions from them, erring on the side of protection when the data doesn’t apply directly, I’m digging in deep to try to really figure out what kind of protection is needed and warranted by the literature. Throughout this process it’s important to remember that I’m not trying to necessarily do what’s best for the development interests, but rather really just trying to find the facts. The project is interesting, and with hundreds of papers available that don’t ask my questions directly but rather offer glancing insights, I have my work cut out for me. I’ll keep you all updated as I draw closer to a conclusion.

Astragalus osterhoutii (endangered) with one of its pollinators

Sama Winder
BLM Colorado State Office

My time as an intern here at the BLM Missoula field office is coming to an end. As I reflect back on the last eight months that I have spent here, I feel like I have come a long way. I never expected to learn so many new things or love Montana so much to want to stay here. I don’t think I really knew what to expect. All I know is that my expectations have been exceeded. Time had definitely flown by. I find myself wanting to slow time down so I can fully appreciate the last few days that I have left here. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to be.  It is not only one of the most beautiful places I have lived and worked but the people here are amazing. The people make all the difference in the world. They are some of the nicest, most passionate, friendly, funny and caring people I have ever worked with. They really care about the work they are doing and work together as a team. They have been very helpful and patient with me.  I am especially grateful for my mentor John Hill and his sense of humor. John works as the Natural Resources Specialist, but he really is a “jack of all trades”. He was always willing to help someone out on a project or let my coworker and I have a cool experience (like going on a raptor survey,  helping save an injured pelican or counting cows). Not only did I have the chance to work with him surveying sensitive and threatened plants, but I also had the opportunity to work with the foresters, wildlife biologist, archeologist, hydrologist, range specialist and GIS specialist. I really feel like I have had a very well rounded internship. I have learned so much from each individual that I worked with and have made some great friendships. I have had a great experience as a CLM intern, I would recommend it to anyone who is seeking to gain more professional experience! This experience has inspired me to stay in Montana for now, my plan is to return for my second year as a CLM intern. I can’t wait to see how the future unfolds!

Lea Tuttle, CLM Intern

BLM Missoula, MT Field Office

As I get ready to head to the SRM (Society of Range Management) Annual meeting in Spokane, WA this weekend, I’m starting to get really excited about meeting other people as nerdy as I am about this kind of stuff.

I’m a little obsessed with public land management and agriculture, especially after working with the BLM in cowboy country for 8 months. My family doesn’t get it, my friends from home in NYC don’t get it. Why would you want to spend your time in the middle of nowhere… and think about cows??

I’m not sure. But I love it. And I admit, I’m not in love with just cows. I’m also in love with the awesome grass species they eat and the awesome volcanic geological history they walk on, and the awesome wildlife they share the wide open spaces with. And, they’re also just delicious.

When I was growing up in New York, I used to think that cattle ranching in the West was a bad thing, that it was taking something irreplaceable from the ecosystems and produces a net negative effect on the landscape. But, it turns out that no one in NY knows anything about cattle, or ranching, or ecosystems in the Great Basin! Whoops. I’ve been so impressed by the ambitious goals of sustainability, both environmental and economic, that the BLM is committed to, and I quickly learned that (much to my disbelief as a life-long horse-lover) the beautiful wild horses romanticized in my childhood and Mid-Atlantic U.S. culture, actually cause dramatically larger ecological problems than cows. Cows are well-managed and the management is dynamic and informed by ecological theory and monitoring. The active management of horses on the other hand, because of little high school NY activists like me 10 years ago (!), is incredibly restricted due to public disapproval. Because they’re cute.

Anyway, I am ridiculously excited to begin my career in this field and to stay in Oregon and to eat lots of cows and to love these amazing landscapes.  I will start working with the Agricultural Research Service as a Technician for plant community ecology research this summer, and the SRM meeting will sort of confirm for me that this is actually happening.  

From the tallest town in Oregon,

Lisa at the Lakeview BLM

With the moisture that we received in December, the Sonoran desert has bloomed! It is amazing to see how much growth has come up in such a short time. In the picture above you can see some wild horses that we came across which were taking advantage of all the wonderful green up. The desert holds so many secrets, while we have been out doing wildlife habitat monitoring, we came across a really unique box canyon that was nestled in a small mountain range. What is so unique is the vegetation that is able to survive in this canyon due to the shade from the canyon walls. It is a true oasis (without much or any standing water) within the desert. As seen from the pictures above, it is quite a unique place. Well,  more to come next month!

Hoffmannseggia glauco, my favorite plant that we collected seed from for SOS.

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name…

…and that horse was a primer grey Toyota Tundra with 160,000 miles on it.

This internship has been beyond incredible.  I’ve learned more in the past ten months than my freshman year of college.  Spending the majority of my time out in the field has allowed me to experience so many unique things – amazing animals, picturesque sunsets, gorgeous scenery, and even a wild looking local or two.  How many 24 year-old girls can say they have changed a flat tire on a dirt road in Death Valley in 116° heat?

What I love most about science is that there is always more to learn.  The more we learn about the world around us, the better we are able to understand how all of the components of the environment connect.  A more complete understanding of these systems enables scientists to make intelligent decisions to manage our natural resources.  I want future generations to be able to experience the environment in the same way I have been so fortunate to.  Through my course, work, and life experiences, I have developed a diverse background in soil science, watershed management, sustainable agriculture, and wildlife biology.  This botany internship has given me a better understanding of how ecosystems are connected.  I want to work in environmental restoration and leave a positive impact on the world.  This job has brought me one step closer to achieving this dream.  Many thanks to all of the wonderful people at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and the CLM program!

–Christi Gabriel

Experts tire changers, pretty good at collecting seeds too.

Dear Snow,

We all miss you in the Intermountain West. Although winter weather remains a distant memory here in Carson City, my duties have shifted more to management.

Our district began work on a new Resource Management Plan to guide our direction over the next 15-20 years. The challenge is really to create a plan flexible enough to promote project-level implementation and strong enough to defend these practices in court. It is exciting to see all eager to contribute to the success of the RMP.

However, this also exposes the reality of the management side of conservation. We have meetings, about meetings, about meetings. In other news, I am applying for field crews next season.

-Justin