To be honest, this past month since my previous post has been a complete blur. So many things have happened, where do I start?

Last month I had found out that my program mentor at the BLM, Mr. Johnny Chopp, was leaving his position here at the Carlsbad, New Mexico, BLM Field Office for his dream job. He had been hired as a wildlife biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers back in his hometown. This was a long-awaited opportunity and great news for him; for me, I am not so sure. He was the only one in the office, nay, the city of Carlsbad, NAY, the whole of Southeastern New Mexico that understood the purpose of the Seeds of Success and how to achieve its goals, and the CLM Program. It left me uneasy to be thrown into such a position that required superior knowledge of this area’s flora and the leadership to work basically unsupervised.

I found this out a week before I took “vacation,” and realized the timing of my out-of-town stint was in such a way that Johnny would be gone by the time I got back. I did not have time to process this transition until I got back to Carlsbad.

My little “vacation” away from the Chihuahuan Desert started with a trip out to Savannah, Georgia, for the Botany 2016 Conference. I was accepted as a PLANTS grant participant for the conference, meaning I got to attend this meeting as a “student,” all expenses paid, with a mentor and peer mentor to help me navigate around the Conference. Unfortunately, the timing of the Conference was awful (as you will see here soon). However, I had such an incredible experience!

A picture of the PLANTS grant participants, peer mentors, and mentors in front of the Historic District of Savannah on the last day of the Conference.

Flying into Savannah was something of a culture shock for me. It was my first time being anywhere near the East coast, or the South! The people are different from the people of Colorado. I had seafood for every possible meal. I got to experience first-hand the 106 degree weather with 90% humidity. Overall, Savannah was an incredible place to visit. But more importantly, I went to my first big conference! I was roomed with a student from California who was just finishing up a summer REU at my home institution (University of Colorado Boulder), with the professor that recommended I go to this conference in the first place…what a small world! I learned the world of botany is a tight and niche group of people where everyone knows everyone, and everyone is incredibly friendly and supportive of one another. I learned so much about the current research in botany, about graduate school, and about what I want to do in the future! I am a recent undergraduate, and was unsure what exactly I wanted to do with my future (one of the reasons I am exploring federal jobs through this current internship). However, coming here I realized I want to get back into academia, and start looking towards graduate school, hopefully in the next year or so. I have a long road ahead of me (for one I still have not yet even taken the GRE), but now I have a goal to go back to school! And as a young adult like me, I think it is important to know what you want, and be passionate about it, and I have officially taken the first step.

A short break from my Carlsbad, NM internship was spent, well, getting married. Unconventional to say in the least, but doable with a great support system. Photo taken by S. Bober

The Conference was a great experience, but like I mentioned earlier, was unfortunately timed. I flew back home as quickly as I could for the second part of my vacation…MY WEDDING. That’s right. I flew home from Georgia to get married the very next day. To be fair, I planned the date of this wedding before I accepted this internship, and before I received a grant to attend Botany 2016. It would not have happened without the everlasting support of my friends, family, and newly-wedded husband. With that said, it ended up being a rather nice gathering and was glad to finally marry my high school sweetheart, love of my life, and best friend of nearly 10 years.

Even with the most supportive people one could ever ask for, I would not suggest planning one’s wedding in the middle of this internship. Going back to Carlsbad straight after getting married was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life, and I would not wish that kind of transition on anyone. With that said, I am happy to say that I have the most encouraging and uplifting people in my life, all on my side for finishing out this internship. It was very hard to come back to Carlsbad, NM, but glad that I did.

There is a solitary beauty in the desert, and on this particular day was enhanced by awesome clouds painted onto a background of blue the and vibrant green of a thirst-quenched desert. Photo taken by B. Palmer

There are plenty of happy pollinators here in the desert, finding their way to vivaciously-colored flowers. Photo taken by B. Palmer

I came back to New Mexico to find that the weather was much more tolerable, and the early July monsoons FINALLY came…over a month late. This is good news for us here, because a lot of the landscape has gone from brown to green, and there are finally seeds to collect now and to collect in the coming weeks. The other Carlsbad CLM intern, Meridith, was even able to do a collection while I was gone.

Our second collection of the season, Mentzelia strictissima. I missed out collecting, but there are plenty more to do! Photo taken by B. Palmer

However, I came back to Carlsbad with no set direct supervisor. Again, an odd feeling for someone as young and inexperienced as I am. There was a day I even went out on my own to scout for plants and potential collections, and came across one that was beginning to fruit. I knew it was one of three things, but went ahead and started collecting it, even though I was unsure of the plants’ identity. I found that I have to rely on myself and using dichotomous keys more now that it is more difficult to ask around what the plants are.

This is a flowering and fruiting yellow aster, one I believe to be Isocoma pluriflora. Please correct me if you believe I am wrong! Photo taken by B. Palmer

In the last few weeks the other CLM intern and I were finally set up with the New Mexico State Botanist, Zoe Davidson, as our new program mentor, and would be getting plant identification help from Patrick Alexander. But the catch: Zoe is located in Santa Fe, Patrick in Las Cruces. Though we have support from afar, we are still on own and are our own boss, and ultimately are the ones to decide what to collect. This indeed has been an interesting leadership opportunity, with a LOT of room for trial and error.

For example, we were driving around scouting for potential populations to collect from, when we could not find a turn onto a dirt road we wanted to take. All of the sudden, we found ourselves on the Texas border, much farther than we intended on ever going! All in the end, you got to shrug it off and realize that sometimes it’s good to get lost, so that the next time you go to that area, you become, well, not as lost!

Sometimes you have to embrace the wrong turns…even if you end up in Texas! Photo taken by N. Montoya

We also learned that we need to do more research before going out to collect seeds. Meridith had decided while I was gone to do some collections in an area called Dark Canyon when I got back, a drainage area that is beautiful, green, and full of potential collections. Our first collection of the day was very successful, collecting the very pollinator friendly Fallugia paradoxa (Apache Plume) with ease.

From the Rosacea is Fallugia paradoxa, known more commonly as Apache Plume. This collection was rather meditative and calming. A great way to start the morning! Photo taken by B. Palmer

We were on a roll, a downright collecting-spree, and decided that Dasylirion leiophyllum (Sotol) would make a nice addition to our collections. This is a plant that to the untrained eye looks similar to Yucca and Agave, with a very tall inflorescence, anywhere between 5 and 15 feet tall. So we set out through every known prickly, pokey, spiny, sharp, jaggy, scratchy, angry plant you could imagine to get to the sotol, which isn’t much of a friendly plant either. Lesson one of the day: Wear clothes you don’t care about messing up and tearing, and if you have a problem bushwhacking through the prickly flora, then you need to get out of there! I was so incredibly tired and scratched up by the end of the morning, but despite the unpleasantness of it all, I would probably do it again.

Practically no “friendly” plant in sight here. But Meridith and I suffered through with smiles on our faces…most of the time…For Science! Photo taken by B. Palmer

Lesson two: If you don’t know what exactly you are collecting, DON’T COLLECT IT AT ALL! Meridith and I were collecting “seed” from these plants, climbing up infructescences of the so-tall stalks to get up to the fruits, when I got to one and realized: we weren’t collecting seed, we were collection old papery remains of old flowers that never fruited! I realized this after nearly an hour of bushwhacking and climbing, because I finally got to a stalk that finally had real fruits/seeds on it. We had no idea what we were collecting! We found out later with some advice and some extra research that Dasylirion will not be ready to collect seed from likely until October. It is rather embarrassing to admit such a fault, but again, it is trial and error. What better way to learn than to bash into your brain that you did something so horribly incorrect the first time around! And now we are forced to try, try again next time, and hopefully with a little more knowledge and wisdom behind us!

Here I am, trying to reach some of the inflorescence of Dasylirion leiophyllum. I will be attempting this yet again in the near future! Photo taken by M. McClure

In a way, I believe that loosing our Carlsbad mentor may have been a blessing in disguise. Being thrown into a position where you are required to rely on yourself is likely one of the best ways to learn. I have to rely on myself to figure out what the species are here. I have to be the judge of when the best timing is to collect certain seeds. I have to plan accordingly to make the best use of my time here in Carlsbad, and be involved in other projects in the office! I honestly thought about quitting this internship early for a number of reasons, but I realized that it is so astoundingly important to finish this out for the SOS program, for the city of Carlsbad and its hidden floral treasures, but most importantly for myself. I have not been known in the past to quit even when I am uncomfortable with a situation, and I cannot start now! In the meantime, I will be forced to enjoy the wonderful array of plants that are popping up all about, and do what I came here to do: botanize!

Tiquilia hispidissima: a Chihuahuan desert and gypsum soil endemic. This is a plant I will never see anywhere else in the world, a good reason to stay in Carlsbad for now! Photo taken by B. Palmer

Another fun species of the Malvaceae family found in the wetter soils and near the hardly existing rivers of the late summer desert: Sphaeralcea angustifolia Photo taken by B. Palmer

Some of a botanist’s more powerful tools: A plant press, and a place to record everything in. Photo taken by B. Palmer

Best wishes from Brooke Palmer of the Carlsbad, New Mexico BLM Field Office. I am officially halfway finished with this internship…until next time!

This will be the final blog post of my internship.  One of the more interesting recent developments for me is finding Ptilimnium nodosum (Haparella) in the park in late July.  This is a federally-endangered plant in the Apiaceae (Carrot Family).  In the 2000s there was a major re-introduction effort within the canal between a professor at George Washington University and the National Park Service.   From my understanding this re-introduction was not successful at establishing new populations, but some useful knowledge was gained through the experience and seeds from it were acquired for long term preservation.  The last time a natural population was found on the main stem of the Potomac River was around 20 years ago.  I hope I am giving enough of an overview while practicing a fair amount of discretion due to the sensitive nature of this information.  I went to that location where it was last seen (a well-developed scour bar) and was surprised to find a decently-sized population in full flower.  I think one could describe this as a meta-population.

Ptilimnium nodosum. Each umbel was rarely larger than a dime.

Ptilimnium nodosum. Even in flower these plants were hard to see. They grew alongside numerous wetland graminoids such as Juncus spp.

Ptilimnium nodosum. The leaves are referred to as phyllodes (reduced leaf petioles). They are hollow and segmented.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, the Potomac at this time of year is usually at its lowest point.  I was able to walk out into the middle of the river and could have crossed into West Virginia on the other side if I desired.

From the middle of the Potomac in late July. The green is Justicia americana (Water Willow)

Another interesting plant I ran into with the help of a lady who has voluntarily been doing plant surveys along a portion of the canal for several years is the state-endangered Trachelospermum difforme (Climbing Dogbane).  Not only had I never seen this plant before this summer, but I had never even heard of it.  This plant is of particular interest to me because it resembles Japanese Honeysuckle morphologically and in growth habit.  As I discussed in a previous entry, the canal is very interested in developing a robust volunteer Weed Warrior program.  Part of my responsibilities involve educating these Weed Warriors about native look-alikes, especially state-listed species.  I must admit that this one is tricky at first and would especially be difficult to less experienced eyes.  Fortunately once you are aware of the plant, it is easily distinguished from Japanese Honeysuckle by its milky sap when leaves are present.  On the other hand I can imagine some difficulties for volunteers because the two can grow intermingled in each other.  This would be particularly hazardous if they are growing together, it’s late in the season and Japanese Honeysuckle is still green while Climbing Dogbane has gone dormant.  The “hazard” being that dormant Climbing Dogbane is mechanically treated by someone thinking it is part of a honeysuckle clump.

Trachelospermum difforme. The milky sap I mentioned earlier.

Trachelospermum difforme. In flower. The manuals state that leaf shape is variable. Some of the leaves were quite oribicular with an acuminate tip. They resembled Oriental Bittersweet leaves to my eyes, though that vine has alternate leaves.

Trachelospermum difforme vs. Lonicera japonica (Japanese Honeysuckle). In my hand is Japanese Honeysuckle. As you can see the two grow alongside each other and can easily be confused as one species.

I went through the photos I took over the season and thought I would include some of the more interesting ones here for fun.

Automeris io (Io Moth) caterpillar on the state-listed Baptisia australis. Will sting you.

Eriocampa juglandis (Butternut Woollyworm) on state-listed Juglans cinerea (Butternut) leaf.

My internship still has a few weeks left but I feel the season waning.  The asters will have their time and fall will be here soon. Cheers to a successful field season.

Coleman Minney

Field Botany Intern

With the SOS collections taking a pause for the moment we have found ourselves going out to help with other projects.  We went on two weed treatment trips on the Green River this month and we have another one scheduled in a couple weeks.  We still are making sure to keep an eye on our targets, its just a lot easier to do that now we are focusing mainly on Artemisia species and Sarcobatus we have a pretty good idea of how our target populations are doing just by driving around.

Green River

Even though I still have almost two months left it seems like the internship is almost over.  We are going to start thinking up the target list for next year’s interns next week and I am starting to interview for jobs.  I was overflowing with excitement when I first got here in May because it looked so strange to me, then it started to seem a bit old in July once the temperatures reached into the triple digits and the bugs started eating us alive.  The summer is coming to an end now and the end of my internship is now on the horizon.  When I was out near Desolation Canyon yesterday doing Penstemon grahamii surveys I had a few chances to look out into the vast expanse of desert and realize that I will miss this place someday.

During the week, I am a CLM Intern, but during the weekend, I work as a Lichen surveyor in the Siuslaw National Forest performing lichen community analysis for air quality monitoring.  This is no roadside analysis, this is bushwhacking through thickets of prickly Salmonberry and Himalayan Blackberry for as far as a mile off an old logging road that was decommissioned 10 years ago and has become a temperate rain forest jungle right-of-way.

Two weekends ago I followed the Alsea River East in from Waldport, OR on Hwy 34.  After about 20+ miles, I turned North for several miles up a Siulsaw logging road, and boy did the name fit the description.  Large segments of the ridge sides were clear cut.  I thought “I have to be on private or state land, there is no way the Forest Service would clear cut to this extent now a days.”  Alas, to my che-grin, I concluded that it had to be  USFS land due to the fact that my survey plot was on it (they’re almost always on  USFS land).

Siuslaw National Slaughter

Siuslaw National Slaughter

Some logging began in the PNW as early as the 1830’s, but it did not kick off until the turn of the century.  In the 1990’s PNW timber contributed to 1/3 of America’s plywood and had fed the housing boom since WWII.  Chances are that any wood house built since 1946 contains materials from the PNW.  Douglas-firs are the most valuable tree in the timber commerce worldwide. In the 90’s, the USFS had proclaimed that timber is the nation’s number 1 agricultural crop.  Timber companies obtain logging units from Private, State, and Federal lands. In fact, virtually all old-growth forests on private forestry company lands have been logged.

The Oregon Forest Practices Act is the legislation that Private and State logging operations have to adhere to and compared to California and Washington legislation, it is pretty lax: comprised of minimal regulations for timber harvesting, road construction and maintenance, slash treatment, reforestation and pesticide and fertilizer use.

To give you some perspective of the amount of timber sequestered from the PNW; there has always been focused attention on the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, however according to 90’s statistics, only 15-30% of the ancient Amazonian rainforest has been logged, compared to about 87% of the ancient PNW forest logged, in less than a century.

Siuslaw National Slaughter

Siuslaw National Slaughter

And now Oregon Public Radio just aired that a new study found that over the last decade an increasing amount of Pseudotsuga menziesii trees on the Oregon Coast Range have been infected with the Swiss needle cast fungal disease.  Oregon State University research has suggested that the epidemic has grown by as much as 30% over 1 year.

The fungus does not actively kill the tree, but instead clogs the needle stomata and thereby greatly reduces tree vitality.  The effect can slow the growth of commercial timber by up to 50% which results in an estimated $128 million dollars in economic losses per year!  However, it has also been shown that if one plants Tsuga heterophylla, Thuja plicata, and Picea sitchensis with the Pseudotsuga menziesii, then the trees are less susceptible to it.  So, in conclusion, if we STOP clear cutting and treating Doug Fir as a crop and instead replant with a variety of trees and lightly thin over longer periods of time, OH YEA, and not export most of our domestic harvest from private and state lands overseas to Japan and Korea, then we might just save little chunks of our coastal temperate rain forests and still keep Oregon’s economy alive.  And maybe we’ll be able to see more Giant Pacific Salamanders (Dicamptodon tenebrosus).

Dicamptodon tenebrosus, the largest terrestrial Salamander in the World. Found in the Siuslaw National Forest along a creek that cuts through a tiny swath of old growth.

Obliquity — physically used to describe the angle of the tilt of our planet’s axis; a departure from perpendicularity with the planar direction we follow through empty space. Also a description of mystery, of indirectness or obscurity.

There is a certain obliquity that is an arrangement of our existence on this planet. Have you noticed it lately?

Oscillating between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees on a 41,000 year cycle, not a single living creature will come to experience this veering in its entirety. But tilting is the reason for the seasons — and we cannot slight the experience of season. These refractory gateways find their own ways of reminding us of, from the mundane to the grandiose. The seasonal changes we experience not only manifest around our physicality but also within ourselves.

We are here again in the serotinal season. Late summer, where swirling changes are closer than the periphery. Fire, barn swallows out of the nest and into the sky, cherry tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, gold grasses with nothing but glumes and the remembrances of vibrant annual wildflowers in their cracking dehiscent fruits. Fall advancing, school coming back on, students returning to Arcata, my next chapter advancing.

Queen anne’s lace (Daucus carota). Arcata Marsh.

In this last month, moving from the inner-bark of July to the serotinal, I have been engaged in my expectedly diverse and open work as a CLM intern. I walked the upper ridges of the King Range to monitor grazing allotments on Johnny Jack Ridge, adding a new experience to my journey at BLM. I took a sort of summer vacation to my heart-place — the big Tuolumne Meadows, were I spent time with friends and family, strolled the high ridges, climbed on feldspar crystals and soaked in the rarefied air. Collecting seeds has certainly been on my plate as well — the collection season is waning and the manzanita berries are nearly ripe!

Tuolumne

I have also been heavily engaged by the Humboldt Bay dunes climate vulnerability and adaptation study (which I will refer to as ClimateReady from now on…), which is a collaboration between U.S. Fish and Wildlife, BLM, State Park (and others), funded by California Coastal Conservancy’s climate ready program. The long-term goals of the project are to understand how climate change will effect the dune ecosystem and to test adaptation treatments. More practically speaking, highly sensitive GPS (RTK, real-time kinematic; think 2 centimeter sensitivity) is used to create dune profiles (measurements of elevation) along 73 transects covering 32 miles of Humboldt’s coastline. These dune profiles are coupled with vegetation data and the entire survey is completed every year in winter and summer! I will be working a good deal with this project in the coming month.

Base station and John, Lanphere Dunes.

King Range, Arcata BLM F.O. Lands

Several posts ago, I explored stewardship in the most practical sense. Pulling broom along the roadside. Collecting native seed. Stepping and living lightly. These beautiful tasks are still a strong stream in my work as a CLM intern. That all said, in thinking about the different facets of stewardship, I have recently come to reflect on a stewardship of another kind.

When we engage in stewardship (acts of care, responsibility and love) we use our complete selves as tools. We use our hearts and minds to design solutions, our communication and connections to implement acts and our bodies to carry them out on an area of land (or sea).

Think of a feature of the land. What does it look like, is it as mysterious as the riparian gulch or as clear and pure as the long jagged scarp of granite?

Perhaps we can agree, that these land forms (or sea-forms) exist within ourselves. You may have already considered this. The peak you stand on within yourself when you have achieved a goal, the dark skulking depths you fear to go, the broad plateau within reaching from one experience to another. Are you in the valley of your life or are you on the shore of the lake of your life?

Thus, we are the tools of stewardship, and within us is the land we wish to be the stewards of (the reciprocality of this relationship should be disarming at the very least). On the path to become better stewards — to give more and love more the land that gives us more than we could ever ask for — this connection seems highly relevant.

The stewardship of another kind I wish to elucidate is moral stewardship, the stewardship of self in which we tend to those inner landscapes. The greater care, love and responsibility we can turn to our inner topographies, the more we will be able to give as stewards.

How can we steward our internal landscapes? These are the slot-canyons of exploration and the endlessly mystifying dune sands shifting. Cooperation, compassion, non-violence, temperance and adventuring to those dark inner riparian areas could be a great place to start.

Yours,

Kaleb Goff

Arcata BLM Field Office, California.

The last day of field work for my CLM internship in Grants Pass, OR brought me back to working with the rare, endangered lily Fritillaria gentneri, which could be considered the centerpiece of my entire internship (trust that you don’t want to hear the rest of my metaphor comparing this internship to Thanksgiving dinner). Only this time, instead of just searching for the lilies and entering data about populations of them, we were digging up their bulbs! All you botanists may be up in arms at that last part, but sit back down in your chairs because we were digging for a good purpose. The clonal reproduction of F. gentneri results in a number of smaller bulblets that can be found attached to its main, “mother” bulb. Every year, the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) identifies F. gentneri plants in the spring that it then collects bulblets from later in the summer. These bulblets are brought back to the ODA’s greenhouses to be cultivated. After about three years in the greenhouse, the plants are ready to be brought back to the wild. They are usually planted in about the same general area that the bulblets were sourced from. These outplantings help augment populations of this rare plant and are imperative to bringing it closer to recovery.

Digging up one of the rarest plant I’ve worked with was nerve-wracking at first, but Kelly and Cameron from the ODA helped me get over it. The bulblets were very small, most were the size of rice grains, and they popped right off the main bulb. I wish I had taken pictures because they were quite adorable, but we were digging among poison oak roots and I didn’t want to get my camera covered in the oils.

This experience brought me closer to coming full circle with Fritillaria gentneri. This whole internship has opened my eyes to the world of endangered plants that I had previously known so little about, the overall message being that a LOT of work goes into trying to help these species recover. Surveying for new populations, revisiting old sites for monitoring, growing new plants for augmentation, adaptive habitat management to protect populations from threat, research, regulations, reports and more paperwork, an incredible amount of time and money, all for a single species!

I’ve learned so much about rare plant conservation, but also a lot about how the BLM operates. I’ve worked with botanists who have provided insight into what it would be like to have their jobs. This experience has shown me what working for the BLM would be like, and after this summer, I could easily see myself enjoying a permanent botany position with the BLM or another government agency.

I’ve really had such an amazing time working as a CLM intern, and I don’t think I could have asked for a better internship experience. I’m so grateful for all the opportunities afforded to me through this internship and for the lasting connections I’ve been able to make. Thanks especially to my awesome mentor Stacy, my super supervisor Biker Bryan, and my favorite fellow intern Lillie.

Kiki, Grants Pass BLM

Over the weekend, here in Salmon, Idaho -where if you didn’t know is the birth place of Sacajawea- there was a Heritage Days festival celebrating her life history and impact on the local Native American population.

The BLM here like to takes an active role in their community, and thus we had a booth set up to work at the festival. I volunteered to help work at it because we were going to be a tent that read stories to children, and I love to work with children.

Me as a blue jay

We set up this really extravagant tent that was shaped just like a fish. It was about 30ft in length and stood about 15ft tall. It was ginormous. There was a zipper on the tail and on the mouth. We would walk into the fish through the tail and we would bring in all the children and I would tell them a story about the salmon life cycle and then when it was finished we would leave out of the mouth of the fish.

Me as a turtle

But the funnest part was that we had all of these animal costumes that someone had made for the tent that were amazingly fun. Everything from a mushroom, to a thunder bird and the kids (and myself) absolutely loved them. They were a blast to play in.

Not only that but we also had a fish painting station for the kids and a sand station where they could make animal tracks. Needless to say we were one of the most popular set ups at the festival.

Me as a mushroom

Over all it was an amazing day interacting with the local community, and it was a blast playing with the children and teaching them about the salmon.

Cheers!

Sierra Sampson

Salmon, Idaho BLM

In late July, I had the opportunity to attend a soils conference hosted by the NRCS (National Resource Conservation Service) and University of Alaska Fairbanks. The presentations varied from policy, regulations, and research, but every presentation focused on permafrost. Technically, permafrost is any soil that is frozen solid continuously for 2 or more years, but there’s so much more to it. There’s stable permafrost, which is much deeper and less likely to thaw. On top of it lies an active layer that is more likely to thaw, changing in depth year to year given the range of air temperatures.

This native Alaskan orchid was found in calcareous soils associated with the frost boils of Sukakpak Mountain.

Within this active layer, a variety of land formations can develop including ice wedges, pingos, and sorted circles. These unique landforms often create a diverse set of microclimates that can support a more diverse plant community. Ice wedges start to grow when rapidly cooling air temperatures crack the ground, allowing snowmelt to enter in the spring and freeze in the winter. Over time, these cycle grows the wedge and pushes soil up and out of the way. At some point, the wedge starts to die. This dying wedge can be the source for a seep, leaving a depression in the ground when it’s completely gone.

Pingos or frost boils result from ice pooling and building underground, pushing the above soil into a dome. Once the soil cracks, all the insulation is gone and the ice melts away. This cracking can be explosive. Local folktales include people building houses or cabins on small hills only to have the house forcefully ejected as the hill implodes. Finally, sorted circles come from the repeated freeze-thaw cycle pushing rocks up to the surface and sorting them by size. However, what all permafrost seems to have in common is a high silt and organic content in a matrix of ice.

A frost boil at Sukakpak Mountain surrounded by wetland in calcareous soils.

As a part of the conference, we were allowed to visit the permafrost tunnel in Fairbanks to see some of these formations in real life. Imagine a dusty tunnel that smells like an old attic at about 31 degrees F with evenly spaced work lights. Hanging from the ceiling is a veil of tangled, fibrous roots of long dead plants. That’s essentially what the permafrost tunnel is like, except in the dusty walls and ceiling you can also see giant blocks and lens of murky black ice. This particular tunnel was built to better understand how to mine in the permafrost. Since it’s construction, it’s now used to study the permafrost itself and the creatures it has encapsulated. For example, one outcropping of plants is an ancient overturned riverbank. The plants were preserved so quickly that they’re still green if you shine a light on them. Steppe bison and woolly mammoth remains are routinely excavated. Towards the deepest end of the shaft is a branch carbon dated to 46,000 years old!

A look down the Permafrost Tunnel in Fairbanks, Alaska. The tunnel is maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The permafrost is a dynamic soil type, but climate change is accelerating and intensifying that dynamic beyond the norm. As Alaska broke its hottest day of the year record this summer, the permafrost has been receding, the active layer encroaching into areas that have historically been more stable. This has some major implications for life in Alaska. When water melts from permafrost, that silty organic mix is a perfect recipe for quicksand, meaning more buildings and roads being swallowed underground and greater dangers of mudslides like this one in Denali National Park. It means greater deterioration of hunting trails that Native Alaskans rely heavily on for subsistence and traditional practices. It also means a greater acceleration of climate change.

Remember that 46,000-year-old branch? The reason it hasn’t decayed is because it’s surrounded by ice. Remove the ice and it’ll start to decompose, along with all the other organic matter in the permafrost. Because it’s deep underground where there’s no oxygen, that decomposition will create methane, which can and does bubble to the surface and escape to the atmosphere. It’s already happening as demonstrated by these scientists. The tundra will go from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Some predictions even show the tundra shifting to a grassland ecosystem if warming continues. Climate change is real and during a summer of record heat and rainfall, it’s quite noticeable here in Alaska.

Want to learn more about permafrost? There’s a new documentary coming out in 2017 specifically on Alaskan permafrost dynamics. Check out the trailer for Between Earth and Sky here.

I can’t believe my internship is nearly halfway over! Time is truly flying by and the ebb and flow of field work is starting to feel normal. After a rather slow June and July, collection season is speeding up, and I welcome it.

In July, I was assigned to my state to work in, which is Delaware, and I definitely have a love/hate relationship with this state. It’s the furthest state from the office (I’m in the New York office), so I spend about eight hours a week just traveling to and from Delaware, which can be tough. We have visited a lot of sites that are fragmented, covered in trash, and just not managed very well, which can be incredibly frustrating. But in contrast, we have visited gorgeous sites that have many of the plants on our list. We have visited pristine dune habitats, beautiful (albeit smelly at times) marshes, and stunning lakes and ponds. I spend a lot of time camping, and my hammock has become a second bed. It’s incredibly rewarding to have a job that allows me to be outside as much as I am.

As the oncoming months arrive, I expect for time to speed up even more. We have spent the last two months working hard to scout out sites for future collections and soon all of that planning will come to use, which is exciting! It feels great to collect seeds, knowing they will be going to restoration projects. It’s a good feeling to know that I am giving back to the ecosystems which I love so much.

Signing off from the Staten Island MARSB office

Barbara Garrow

Tree frog on some cattail (Typha latifolia)

Black racer (Coluber constrictor) just hanging out.

My partner, Gio, trying not to fall into the wetland – a common occurrence while on the job.

Its been a while since I last wrote anything here, but a lot has gone on since the last time and I have been learning a lot of new protocols in the meantime. The last time I wrote I was just about to head off to the CLM conference in Chicago. It was a great experience! We heard talks from people working with and studying native seed, learned more about the Seeds of Success program, got to explore the beautiful Chicago Botanic Garden grounds, and were able to meet many other fellow interns. It was nice to be back in a city again too, I haven’t had Chipotle since being there.

I finally saw a sage grouse! Truly the reason for this field season

When we returned to Shoshone, we finished up our HAF surveys in a few weeks and moved on to many other protocols. The next protocol we worked on was fire re-entry. After fires, the BLM will seed some specific grasses that do well in the climate and that the cows and other grazers will find palatable. Looking for the seeded grasses, we would walk a transect and measure the closest species, note whether it had seed heads or not, and give it a quick tug to see if grazers would rip it out or not when trying to eat it. We pretended to be cows for a while and it was pretty sweet.

The area on the left burned in 2014, the difference is stunning

After that we checked out some trend data plots. These sites were established in the 1960’s and have been monitored every couple years until the present. This long term data give a great picture of how the land is changing over time and what the impacts on specific areas are. Unfortunately we were unable to find 2 of the sites, apparently fires burned through the area and, in the re-seeding effort, the plots got ripped up. The rest of the plots we found gave us great data though, and I feel confident in saying that I am an expert at identifying dead plants in Southern Idaho.

I had never gone caving before, but we were able to go out with the Geo Corps team, people that work with the geological resources in the field office, and explore some of the caves around here. Southern Idaho has a volcanic history, and that activity has left many caves in the area, mostly of the lava tube variety. We explored 4 caves, including Gypsum Cave, which, measuring 2.5 miles long, is the second longest lava tube in the lower 48 states. I was also able to go with the Geo Corps team to assess some sites for rock hounding in our field office. They were making a brochure for the field office to hand out to people looking for neat rocks, and we went to some of the sites to see if it was worthwhile to send people there. Although the day I went with them didn’t lead to as exciting finds as some of their other sites, I found some obsidian and cool looking calcite.

Gypsum Cave

Tea Kettle cave, my favorite cave so far

Caves lead to some good opportunities for artsy photos

I found out obsidian and quartz are both primarily made from SiO2, but the difference is black and white!

Finally we were able to join up with the Idaho Fish and Game biologist to do some monarch tagging! Monarchs go through a huge migration every fall down to Mexico, and our goal was to catch and tag ones we saw in order to get some data on where the monarch population of Idaho end up. It was fun to spend a day working with butterflies, and it was pretty funny to be grown adults sprinting down the road with a butterfly net. We were only able to tag 2 Monarchs, but luckily more were tagged before we got started.

After catching them, a small sticker is placed on the right wing

I have about 2 months left in my internship now, and I have certainly learned a lot and had experiences I would probably not have anywhere else. Huge shout out to my mentor, Joanna, for coming up with all of these opportunities for us, I can’t wait to see what the rest of the season has to offer!

Ipomopsis aggregata, one of the showier plants I’ve seen out here

BLM, Shoshone field office