I’ve been working over the past few weeks on a USGS project monitoring the survival and spawning movements of shortnose and Lost River suckers in the upper Klamath Basin of southern Oregon. Named for their distinctive bottom foraging mouths, the two endemic fishes are endangered due to a mixture of factors mainly affecting water quality (an issue that seems surprising judging by our proximity to super-clean Crater Lake just to the north). In an effort to track population behavior throughout the season and from year to year, hundreds of fish have been injected with PIT tags (centimeter-long radio-frequency microchips) that identify each individual by number when scanned or picked up by remote antenna.

Along with another intern, my job has been to assist in the capture/recapture and tagging of suckers in Upper Klamath Lake and its tributaries, as well as the maintenance of detection stations. Sampling is performed by boat using trammel nets, and was described to me fairly accurately as “mist netting underwater” (although thankfully fish have fewer pointy bits to get tangled up by than birds). After carefully cutting the fish out, they’re placed in a tub on board and then transferred to a crew on shore for processing and release.

This all takes place by headlamp at night (when net success is highest), under often stormy conditions, and on a virtually undeveloped and untraveled lake, making for quite the exhilarating and surreal environment. It’s beautiful on calm nights, though, with spectacular sunsets over the foothills of the Cascades.

While I’m still in the early stages of the internship, the experience has been very enjoyable and productive so far, and it is helping to clarify for me how working under a federal agency compares to university research. For one thing, it carries with it a greater sense of responsibility since we’re operating on public dollars, and since conservation efforts on the lake have been at the center of much controversy over water rights, involving a diverse group of stakeholders.

I’m looking forward to the variety of projects and learning opportunities ahead, and assuming that my waders and dry suit hold up, it should be a memorable summer!

Tommy Esson

Chicago Botanic Garden-USFWS & USGS

Klamath Falls, OR

I just accepted an internship on Fort Ord near Monterey California. I am a recent graduate of Northern Arizona University with a major in Environmental Management. I just started this internship two weeks ago and am loving it out here. I found a house close to the ocean which is something new to me moving from Arizona and growing up in Colorado. So far this internship has taught me so many things in the coastal botany world that I didn’t know. This area is absolutely beautiful. My mentor Bruce is an awesome guy and a very great teacher as well.  He has been teaching me all there is to know about every aspect when it comes to land management. I am very happy with this internship so far and guarantee it will only get better!

I accepted a CLM internship working for the BLM in Needles, CA, which is a small town located in the Mojave Desert on the Colorado River bordering Arizona and nearby Nevada. I am from southeast Texas, so I had a very long drive! Driving to California was an experience in itself. I had only previously been to southeastern New Mexico, so for the most part, the entire drive consisted of areas I had never been or seen before. The snow on the ground in Flagstaff, AZ was a really nice surprise! I had a safe trip the entire route. Once I arrived in Needles, I moved into a really nice house that I am renting with three other CLM interns. My roommates are all very nice. I just started working this past Monday, March 19, 2012. My boss is great! She is very nice, flexible, and I forsee having a great working relationship with her. I am the general biology intern for this office, so I will get to help with a multitude of projects. This is absolutely wonderful, because I will be able to maximize experience here. Overall, I think this is going to be a great opportunity for myself, and I am looking forward to everything! Thank you CLM and BLM for giving me this opportunity.

Alicia Rodriguez

My internship is turning out to be a great learning opportunity. I recently just finished a short course at University of Nevada-Reno on grasses taught by a brilliant botanist, Arnold (Jerry) Tiehm. The grass class really helped me learn generally characteristics about the grasses present in the Great Basin. It also doesn’t hurt to have the class taught by a regionally famous plant collector, Arnold Tiehm, who has multiple plants named after him.

Besides the grass class, the intern crew and myself have been knee-deep in data entry and analysis. We have been completing some data analysis on a threatened plant within our BLM district, Eriogonum diatomaceum or Churchill Narrows Buckwheat. It is interesting to see the process on how to monitor rare/threatened plant species and how the BLM handles such plants. My mentor and all the interns are meeting soon with the USFWS to present our data to hopefully get the plant transferred to a threatened and endangered list, so this plant may be preserved for many years to come. I know that data entry and analysis is boring and monotonious, but we are finding some interesting trends that could lead to great improvements in the future protection of this plant, so I feel my (what feels like) endless hours hunched over a computer will be rewarded soon enough.

In my first three weeks of interning here in Arcata, CA I have had the opportunity to expand my knowledge of the particular vegetation communities throughout this very unique region of the country. This is my second internship through CLM and it is entirely different from my last. I have spent at least 75% of my time in the field. My mentor, Jennifer, showed me through the procedures for two separate vegetation surveys which she does annually, but I was quickly set loose to complete the work solo. I’m grateful that she has such confidence in my ability to learn on the fly to take charge of data collection essentially immediately.

The first project upon which we are focusing is monitoring the life history characteristics of noted specimens of Beach layia (Layia carnosa), a small fleshy plant growing on the naturally disturbed areas of the dunes surrounding Humboldt Bay. While the species is currently listed as endangered, my mentor along with several of her colleagues believe that the species is thriving well enough to merit down-listing by the USFWS. Our data from this season is critical to accomplishing those agenda.

The second project, which has consumed most of my time thus far, is surveying the vegetation along several established transects on the dunes that my mentor and previous interns have been surveying since 1999. This project has forced me to learn 30-40 species of dune dwelling plants, from native and rare to invasive. I have picked up several of the species rapidly, but others take time. Nonetheless my confidence in identification and efficient surveying along the transect has improved in these first couple weeks.

I am very much enjoying my time in northern California. Coming from the east coast, this climate is very similar to what I would be seeing in New England this time of year, but it is also my favorite type of weather. There is ample rain and humidity–without the stifling heat– which is a welcome change from my first internship on the front range in Colorado. I’m looking forward to finishing up the dune work this spring and moving on to other projects that Jennifer has waiting in other areas of BLM land later on in the summer. I expect to have more to write about regarding exploring the thick coast redwood and douglas fir forests in my next entry.

Andy, BLM Arcata

From Cedar Swamps to the Mojave is a bit of a change. On the drive from south Jersey to Las Vegas I could not stop thinking,  wow this is going to be an amazing experience, and please truck don’t give up on me now. So far I was right, the truck made it and everything has been wonderful. The Springs Preserve is an amazing place with a lot of great people which make it work. So far we have been working on an upcoming plant sale at the preserve, organizing the different species, potting, and collecting plants from the area. We recently took a group of volunteers from UNLV to a site to do a cactus salvage, where we removed several species of cacti from a future development site and replanted them for the sale. It was a great experience  working with the students and actually watching them get excited when they would find the cacti. This past week we also began to scout the surrounding areas for the SOS program. It was awesome to get out there in the middle of nowhere and get to see some of the different areas we would be collecting, as well as a great chance to learn the different species throughout the desert.  I can’t wait for the desert to awake and really get going.

I still have a lot to learn about the desert and the different aspects of the  job, but luckily I am surrounded by wonderful mentors and coworkers. This is going to be fun. I am looking forward to the next five months.

The past month I have largely spent working on a database collection of Florida lichens. I had largely spent my time leading up to last month checking to make sure that the data in the database was correct. This past month, I’ve had the pleasure to check the taxonomy of the collections. Its an amazing experience to have an herbarium of lichens to evaluate. It may seem daunting to have a 1,000 specimens to check, but its a great opportunity, because with that large amount comes the possibility to check identifications against each other. Its much easier to find mistakes if you have the ability to say “this one isn’t like the others.”

Lichens are tedious, but so is all taxonomy. Species are dependent on both chemical and physical characteristics. This leads to a lot of looking and testing. Chemical tests are simple.  Just take a fragment of the lichen and put a drop of bleach or 10% KOH on it, and watch for a color change. My favorite is the UV light.  The lichens often turn yellow or blue depending on what compound is in them.

I’ve learned so much about lichen taxonomy.  This has been a dream perfect internship and opportunity. Another joy is finding rare lichens. In the past month, my mentor Roger Rosentreter and I have found a few disjunct populations, the southern limit of a few more species, and a few that we don’t what they are (“weird chemistry”).  Hopefully I will have an update on those specimens in a future post. Also I hope to write a paper on these interesting lichens.

I also went back to the endangered Allium aaseae site (please see previous posts). A coworker and I cleaned up some of the vegetation we had cut a while back. A few of the onions were in bloom! Below is a photo I took of the onion.

Barry, BLM Idaho State Office

There is something remarkable about the contrast of the burnt finger-like remnants of a stand of willow trees sticking out of blackened soil in a snow-covered creek. Despite this ominous view, if you look close enough, new life can be seen sprouting through the snow and along our trodden path. Thanks in part to reseeding efforts, these feeble patches of green will grow strong and help to stabilize soils and recolonize this burnt landscape. For four days we’ve been hiking up and down a beautiful canyon with amazing views of a small farming and ranching valley shrouded in a ring of mountains. The reason: public concerns that the erosion of the stream in this canyon on Bureau of Land Management land will lead to flooding and damage to adjacent homes and properties. To minimize the erosion and prevent the flooding, we are trying to establish a new stand of willow trees in highly eroded areas near their burnt relatives. To do this, we hike past the fire into un-burnt areas and collect cuttings of healthy willows. After packaging and burying them, we leave them for a couple months to induce root formation. Ultimately we will dig them up and plant the willows in dense stands. We have already managed to collect four-thousand willow cuttings, not the mention the cuttings we’ve been working on at other fire-affected sites.

In addition to the remarkable views, fun willow cutting experiences, and surreal burnt landscapes, the past few weeks have also been full of road trips to Salt Lake City and Chico for training. In Salt Lake City, we attended a five day long pesticide applicator and integrated pest management training session. This was a great opportunity to learn more about weed science, integrated pest management, and biocontrol, among other topics. As someone who has considered integrated pest management as a potential area of study in graduate school, I was fascinated by this training and incredibly happy to have the opportunity to hear about its application in real-world scenarios. It was also a great opportunity to connect with the other interns over dinner or while playing in the snow on our nightly walks back to the hostel. To finish up this week, we drove home, spent one night in our own beds, and woke up before the crack of dawn to drive to Chico and attend a class on lichen identification. This training was totally worth the early morning wake up call. Now we now longer have to wonder what the bright green and orange crusts on the rocks are, we have been given the tools to identify then and understand the physiology of these fascinating organisms.

Oh! and I can’t forget to mention, we also saw wild horses!!!

Lauren
Carson City, Nevada

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! Each internship position is unique–different types of ecosystem, varied tasks, particular emphases; I have had the great pleasure of serving at Pine Hill Preserve, a plant preserve established in western El Dorado County, California, to protect eight rare plant species and their habitat.

MONITORING. The Pine Hill Preserve manager (my mentor) has multiple monitoring projects set up; each one is intended to gather basic scientific data to help identify management activities that benefit a particular rare plant species or the suite of rare plants in any given area of the Preserve. In addition to partaking in the counting, measuring, and recording of data in the field, I have also entered data into spreadsheets and created graphs to aid in analyzing the data.

Monitoring response of Stebbin's morning-glory (Calystegia stebbinsii) after a fire several years ago

Point and line transect data to monitor the federally endangered Pine Hill ceanothus in a fuel break

Monitoring percent cover of Pine Hill ceanothus

Counting stems of El Dorado bedstraw (federally endangered) and unsuccessfully trying to avoid contact with poison oak

Counting stems and flowers of the rare El Dorado mule-ears

SURVEYING. Throughout California, proactive measures to protect human life and private property from the potentially devastating effects of wildfires is critical, especially when the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) borders highly flammable vegetative communities like the chaparral. The Pine Hill Preserve is composed of 5 primary discontiguous units; accompanying the fragmentation of the Preserve is a lot of WUI. One of the main units is essentially surrounded by dense development; thus, fuels reduction of this unit is a number one priority. Before any cutting or removal of the woody vegetation can commence, the proposed fuel break must be surveyed for rare plants. Surveying in thick chaparral is not a simple task (read “Chaparral” blog post); it’s not a walk in the park, through a grassland, or under a forest canopy. We are currently about halfway done surveying a 10-acre plot which is due for a fuels reduction make-over; this took over 28 person hours. If we were not finding any rare plants, I might become convinced that my time and effort awkwardly crawling through the chaparral was in vain. BUT…such is not the case, and we have been finding many small, young Layne’s butterweed (Packera layneae) on this 10-acre parcel! How rewarding!

Flags mark the federally threatened Layne's butterweed in the Pine Hill Preserve

Flagging of rare plants accomplished while doing the Chaparral Crawl (elaborated upon in a future blog entitled "Danger")

Pink flags (upper left side) signaling El Dorado bedstraw plants

Rare plants flagged to indicate where NOT to pile and burn brush

DISCOVERY: As much as I’d like to claim I’ve discovered a new plant species OR an unnamed relative of an identified species OR even just find an undocumented population of a rare species, it is still quite amazing and very cool to be able to simply observe an unnamed species or subspecies or variety, even if I didn’t discover it. Anatomical features initially pointed to a possible close relationship with one of the rare plant species at our Preserve. Over the past year, a former CLM intern has been conducting molecular studies on this species and several related species as part of her graduate work; her findings currently do not support a close evolutionary relationship between the newly discovered specimen and the federally listed species at Pine Hill Preserve.

How marvelous! Looking at an unnamed plant species

I have been working on a large seed/plant document for the last few weeks, it has been a fun challenge. I have about 213 species on the list to be complete. The information included is description, distribution, habitat, soils, problems and benefits, along with seed per pound. I hope to get out in the field soon with some of this rain we have gotton in the past few months I look forward to seeing some spring plants.