Greetings once again from the North Carolina Botanical Garden!  As autumn has progressed, we have been hard at work collecting more seeds of native Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain species.  In mid-October, my coworker and I far surpassed our personal record by making 37 seed collections during an 8-day trip!  With November marching on, the frosty early mornings are making me grateful that our SOS work is winding down.

Six months have come and nearly gone, and the SOS crew here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden find ourselves at the end of our internship season.  I could say that I can’t believe so much time has passed, but that’s not totally true.  After so many months of pretty much constant travel, I am feeling the need to settle down and be in one place for a while.  That’s not to say that I regret the work, though!  At this point, the crew has surpassed our goal of 200 collections for the year.  I feel a solid sense of accomplishment  about all these collections being banked by the Seeds of Success program.  This means that I have personally contributed to building a national seed bank to protect the genetic legacy of many native North-American plants.  According to the BLM website (BLM.gov),  “[t]he long-term conservation outcome of the SOS program is to support BLM’s Native Plant Materials Development Program, whose mission is to increase the quality and quantity of native plant materials available for restoring and supporting resilient ecosystems.”  I know that not everyone in this line of work really thinks about the bigger picture of why we are doing what we do.  I also know that I may be in the nerd-tastic minority, but I spend a lot of time thinking not only about issues of genetics and statistics that drive our technical protocol, but about how our project connects to the wider scene of conservation biology/ecology and land management in today’s society.  Suffice it to say that having the opportunity to do my own small part in building a big old germplasm library makes me feel that I’m working toward something very positive!   That same seed bank, and the ideas that helped form it, may help our culture move into the uncertain future of climate change, shifting land-use patterns, and ever-changing human population with more grace and adaptability than would otherwise have been possible.  Ok that’s enough of me waxing philosophical.  Here are some cool photos from our last few weeks of work:

I commute weekly to Chapel Hill from Asheville, NC. My westward trek at the end of the week means I get to enjoy beautiful sunsets while unwinding from work.

The clouds were particularly beautiful on this day of collecting Panicum amarum and Uniola paniculata on the dunes of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia.

This field season presented me with many opportunities to appreciate the beauty of the coastal salt marshes in this region!  This one can be found at the Frank M. Ewing Robinson Neck Preserve on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Another scene I have come to appreciate better during my internship: the eerie elegance of the baldcypress swamp. This photo was taken at First Landing State Park in Virginia.

For the last two weeks of our internship, my coworkers and I will tie up loose ends, such as re-naming photo files, double checking data sheets, and packaging and shipping our last collections and voucher specimens.  Most of us look forward to beginning the second year of this project next spring.   I hope everyone else had an enlightening and fulfilling field season.  Until next year, happy hibernation!

Greetings again from North Carolina!  The past couple weeks have been full of adventure for our Seeds of Success East crew.  We got to try something new and collect seeds from a boat at the National Park Service’s Dyke Marsh Preserve outside of Washington D.C.  As a large chunk of our target species are semi-aquatic, we have been longing to use a boat for collections for most of the season.  We finally got our chance, and even had a captain to chauffeur us around in a motorboat.  We worked with National Park Service staff to collect Fraxinus profunda, or pumpkin ash.  The seeds of the ash will be banked in order to provide a genetic repository and a means of replanting after the devastating ash borer insect moves on out of the area.  Brent Steury, a Natural Resources Program Manager from the Park Service who we worked with on this project, filled us in on the threat.  The bugs seem to be just beginning to move into the area, but due to their exotic origins, the trees have little to no defense against them and almost 100% mortality is expected as they begin to prey on area ash populations.  The future looks grim for these trees, but it was gratifying to know that we are working well ahead to ensure that the genetics will not be lost.

The crew wading around outside our collection boat at Dyke Marsh

During a quiet moment before the rain hit, we collected Polygonum arifolium in the surreal beauty of this baldcypress swamp at Pettigrew State Park in NC.

The week after that, we had to face the threat of Hurricane Joaquin!  Most of the state of North Carolina was already expecting heavy rains for the few days that Joaquin was cooking up in the Atlantic to our southeast.  As my collection partner and I prepared to head to the Outer Banks, we packed extra rain gear and continuously monitored the coastal weather to make sure we weren’t driving into a dangerous situation.  As it was, we got lucky and didn’t work in anything worse than a light drizzle.  We drove north to Currituck Banks, to check on the maturity of the Sea Oats (Uniola paniculata) that we are planning to collect in that area.  We were greeted by a tumultuous sea and high winds.  We stayed only long enough to take a peek at the Uniola and see that where there is normally a wide, flat, beach that 4×4 trucks use as a road, there were only angry gray waves breaking just below the primary dunes.  We had only spent one day at the Outer Banks when rain, high tides, and wind-driven currents started to flood the roads.  We quickly decided to get off the barrier islands before anything could happen that would leave us stranded out there on what is basically a very thin strip of sand off the mainland.

Winds whip a “No Swimming” flag as the ocean becomes tumultuous ahead of Joaquin’s arrival.

We kept watching Joaquin, not sure yet if he would hit the coast or veer east out to sea.  We headed north to Virginia and got a head start on the storm.  While we were there, the rain subsided a bit, but again, high winds, heavy rains in the area, and higher-than-normal tides were causing minor flooding all over the place.  We had to cancel visits to all of our National Wildlife Refuge sites, as they closed due to flooding.  We went to a few more sites during the week, but high water made some of our potential collections impossible.  In the end, we headed back to Chapel Hill early and spent more time than normal working on species research and keying out some unknowns.  It was actually great to spend the time identifying some of the unknown plants we have been encountering.  Now we know more of the species that we are looking for in our seed scavenger hunt.

Next week, the weather is supposed to be clear and I’m sure we will be very busy collecting everything that we didn’t get to last time around.  I hope everyone else is staying safe as the weather becomes a bit more tumultuous this month.  Until next time, peace outside!

Emily Driskill

SOS East: North Carolina Botanical Garden

Greetings again from the North Carolina Botanical Garden!  Actually, greetings from the field on the Southeastern Coastal Plain, where my crew has been spending 95% of our time.  The last time I wrote, we were waiting for a lot of our target species to develop mature seed.  That time has passed!   It’s hard to believe, but Autumn is already here, and we are staying very busy with our rounds of seed collections in North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland’s coastal plain areas.  Our crew of four has split into two teams in order to cover the most ground possible.  My teammate, Lauren, and I have decided to take on a schedule starting in September where we work 8 ten-hour days in a row, and then take off 6 days in between.  This schedule is intense, but rewarding, because it gives us enough time to really cover a lot of ground and make a ton of collections in a week, and then have a nice long chunk of off-time at home before doing it all over again.  Because we do a lot of driving across a three-state range, it makes the 6-ish hour drive to Maryland and some parts of Virginia worth it, and we don’t feel like we have to turn around and drive right back immediately.

My crew has now obtained permits and visited over 75 sites in our range.  By the end of the season, that number will top 100.  It is interesting to see that the parcels of land in conservation are much, much smaller and spread out here on the East Coast than what I observed while living out West.  Instead of working on one or two enormous tracts of Forest Service or BLM land, we have been contacting and scouting dozens of National Wildlife Refuges (managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service), The Nature Conservancy Preserves, State Parks, County parks, and various land trusts.  Some of my favorite sites we have visited have been the National Wildlife Refuges.  These sites tend to be a bit larger, allowing for a diversity of micro-climates and habitats, which seems to provide more continuity for the plant and animal species that make their homes there.  In addition, these Refuges tend to have some spectacularly beautiful views!

A view from shore at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia

Salt flats at Chincoteague Island National Wildlife Refuge

An advancing storm over Chesapeake Bay as seen from Eastern Shore National Wildlife Refuge. Luckily, we were done with work for the day!

Another interesting thing about these conservation lands in the East is their proximity to developed, urban landscapes.  Occoquan Bay NWR, which has become one of our favorite sites, is only minutes from the urban sprawl that extends out of Washington D.C.  While we are there, the hubbub and traffic (OH, the traffic!) is far from our thoughts as we listen to the gentle lapping of the waves on the shore.  One of our recent collections at this site was Strophostyles helvola, annual sand-bean, or wooly-bean, a cute little viney legume that pops open its pods and hurtles the seed every which way when mature.  Using a bag with a wide opening helps while collecting this little guy!

Strophostyles helvola, with an immature fruit

As September breezes by, the onslaught of hunting season is upon us as well.  When considering that turkey, deer, and bear hunting is allowed on National Wildlife Refuges, one may wonder if the term “refuge” is really appropriate.  I’m sure this is one of the main reasons these Refuges were set up, though, and how they continue to maintain funding.  I know the managers of the lands are doing their best to keep balanced populations on their properties, especially considering how close most of them are to developed areas.  They must be doing something right, because the list of wildlife we have seen while working this season includes bear, deer, bald eagles, osprey, groundhogs, beaver, snakes, lizards, and even an alligator!  This doesn’t even include the countless species of smaller birds or the numerous pods of dolphins we’ve spotted while working along the coast.

Although all the driving and nights in hotels can become a bit of a grind, thinking of all these experiences helps me realize just how lucky I am to have such a fabulous job.  While most of the people of Washington D.C. or Raleigh might think of nature as something “other,” not a part of their everyday environment, I have the privilege to walk within it every day, and witness its everyday moments of radiance and tranquility.  I get to behold the glorious skies and beautiful blooms of her shining moments, and the stinking muck and terrifying venom of her darker side.  And all of these things help to make me who I am, someone a bit outside the norm of this “civilized” society, perhaps, but also one who is in touch with the pulse of nature and the rhythm of the seasons.  I’ll leave it on that note.  Until next time, peace outside!

Emily Driskill

SOS East: North Carolina Botanical Garden

Greetings again from North Carolina!  Over the past few weeks, I have spent a whole lot of time traveling and getting to explore the southeastern coastal plain.  Since I last wrote, the crew first spent a week scouting SOS collection sites in Maryland, mostly on the Delmarva Peninsula, off the mainland coast. We traveled to several sites that we have obtained permits for, however they tended to be heavily forested or swampy area.  We are searching for some species that live in these habitats, but didn’t find a suitable population of any of these to collect.  Many of the species we saw were either past fruiting, had not yet bloomed, or were in insufficient numbers to be collected.  It was a bit demoralizing to do so much scouting (and SO much driving), only to find so little to collect, but we did get some collections made in the more marshy places that we found.  We also made note of good sites to collect some of our swamp/forest species like Parthenocissus quinquefolia (Virginia creeper) in the future, when the seeds are mature.

The swampy environment at Nassawango Creek Preserve in Maryland.

At a certain point in our scouting and collecting, we reached a place where the seed cycle was at a sort of natural break, between early-ripening species that we have already collected and later-ripening summer species that were in full bloom at the time.  We took the opportunity to spend a week at our headquarters, the North Carolina Botanical Garden.  We used the time to process, package, and ship all the seed collections we have made up to this point.  We also continued our efforts to research all the species we are targeting for collection.  Our target list contains about 160 species, and because we are not familiar with all these species off the bat, we wanted to be prepared to encounter these in the field.   Our research has included learning the families and blooming/fruiting periods for the species, as well as looking up photos and, in some cases, drawing certain diagnostic characteristics like the shape of leaves or fruits.  I have also been looking at how the species may be grouped together according to habitat.  This part of the work has been interesting for me.  Because I recently moved to North Carolina from the west coast (Washington State and northern California), my main goal in this internship has been to learn more of the Southeastern flora, which I certainly have been.

A shipment of our seed collections, packaged up and ready to ship to the SOS seed-cleaning facility.

The next week, when the crew traveled to the North Carolina coast again, our research immediately paid off.  We were able to quickly identify many of the species that have begun blooming and/or fruiting since our last trip to this area, several weeks ago.  It was also helpful to be able to quickly find out that some of the species we encountered were not on our list, and that we did not need to spend any more field time trying to identify them to species.  When we got to our first sites, it was clear that our timing was good and there were species maturing that we would have the first opportunity to collect.  These included Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) and Typha latifolia (broadleaf cattail), which we collected at Buckridge Preserve and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Preserve respectively, on our first day of traveling.  We went on to make several more collections throughout the week, with one of the most interesting being of Cakile edentula (searocket), an edible member of the Brassica (cabbage and mustard) family, which grows on and around sand dunes right along the coast.

The dune habitat where we collected seeds of Cakile edentula. Cakile is the yellowish-looking plant in the right foreground.

Seeds of Cakile edentula

As late summer comes on, the pace of our collections is picking up.  I can already tell we will have to prioritize what we go after as many species at different sites will be reaching maturity around the same time.  As we continue into the next several weeks, can see that I need to take more photos so I can share my experience with everyone.  Until next time, happy collecting!

In early June, I began working as part of the Seeds of Success (SOS) East program stationed at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.  The first few weeks were full of training, herbarium research, organizing gear, searching for potential collection sites, making contacts, and applying for permits.  These are all essential tasks of course, but after a few weeks of mostly indoors work, the crew was more than a little antsy to get into the field.

Within the past week, our permits to collect seed have begun to roll in.  This was fantastic news for us, because it meant we got to load up and ship out to the North Carolina Outer Banks on Tuesday morning!  Our first foray was into the Buxton Woods Coastal Reserve, right next to the Cape Hatteras lighthouse.  The Outer Banks is a chain of barrier islands; thin strips of sand separating the mainland coast and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean.  The islands measure about 3 miles at their very widest points, making it convenient to investigate both the sound side and the ocean side coasts.   The Outer Banks is naturally the first part of the North Carolina coast to absorb the effects of hurricanes coming in off the Atlantic.   SOS focuses on species that will colonize and stabilize coastal areas, particularly after hurricane damage, so these islands are a great place to find what we are looking for.  We have a list of about 160 species targeted for collection.

As soon as we got out and began looking around at Buxton Woods, I was grateful for all the time we have spent in the herbarium and in the keys researching some of our species that may get confused.  Having moved to the Southeast fairly recently from the Pacific Northwest, I’ve been confronted with dozens and dozens of unfamiliar taxa.  While I can say that my knowledge of the Southeastern flora has grown by leaps and bounds over the past month, I still have so much to learn!  Even so, our study of the species list really paid off.  Before last month, I couldn’t have told you anything about Schoenoplectus americanus, which is a type of brackish-marsh dwelling sedge also known as chairmaker’s bulrush.  At this point, however, I think I will forever recognize Schoenoplectus and the closely-related Bolboschoenus species when I come across them in their watery habitats.  S. americanus was one of the first collections we made at Buxton Woods, along with seeds from Juncus roemerianus (black needle rush).  I quickly learned to be cautious where you step, not only because of the water mocassins (!), but because the deep marshy mud will suck the boots right off your feet!

Ground level view of Schoenoplectus americanus and Eleocharis fallax, two of the species my crew collected seeds from this week.

Getting those first seeds into the bag was deeply satisfying for me.  We were finally doing what we came here to do!  The rest of the week was spent exploring the Coastal Reserve system on the Outer Banks, which includes the Currituck Banks and Kitty Hawk Woods Coastal Reserves, in addition to Buxton Woods.  We also made collections at the Pine Island Audubon Santuary, where we were fortunate enough to stay at a bunk house on the property.  We made about 6 collections for SOS, and did quite a bit of scouting to see which sites contained our species of interest, and where these species were in terms of phenology.  I kept a running list of which species we found at each site, which is helping me to learn the plants better and will be useful when we plan to return to each site. Many of the plants we looked at were either still in the vegetative stage, or had just begun to flower.  We will revisit each site at intervals through the season to capture the full spectrum of seed maturity times.

My crew hard at work pressing specimens and recording data on Pine Island Audubon Sanctuary

Rhexia mariana, or Maryland Meadow-beauty. This is a species we will revisit at Pine Island in the next month to see when the seeds are mature.

The view out from the dunes at Currituck Banks Coastal Reserve.

We will return to the North Carolina coast next week to continue our collections and reconnaissance.  The crew is moving into the full swing of field season, and it feels good.  I’ll be saving up our stories until next time.

Til then, cheers!  And watch out for snakes.

Emily

Here I am, wrapping up my first week of training as a CLM intern for the North Carolina Botanical Garden.  My college training and first botany jobs were all on the west coast, mainly in Washington state, so I’m so happy to have this opportunity to get to know more of the Southeastern flora.  My crew will be working primarily on the coastal plain of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, collecting seeds to be used for conservation projects as a part of the BLM Seeds of Success Program.

The boardwalk through the Coastal Plain Habitat Garden at NCBG

Although I have been living in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, for the past several months, this week brought me to Chapel Hill (and the Piedmont) for the first time, and I’ve been getting acquainted with the beautiful NC Botanical Garden and all the plants (and dedicated staff) showcased there.  I’ve been paying special attention to the Coastal Plain Habitat Garden, as it holds many species that I’ll likely become very familiar with over the next few months.  Luckily, my mentor Amanda is finishing up her master’s thesis on the coastal plain flora, so she will certainly be a great teacher and resource in that area.

This week was dedicated to Seeds of Success (SOS) training, and we got together with the other eastern crews working on the project, from New York and New England.  Together we’ve all been going over the SOS protocol and learning a bit of introductory plant I.D. and genetics to guide us in our work.  The past two days, we had the privilege to get out into the field and make our first two seed collections of Glyceria striata (fowl mannagrass) and Zephyranthes atamasca (Atamasco lily).  It was satisfying to actually get some seeds in our hands and going through the process has me looking forward to more field work.

seeds of Atamasco lily (Zephyranthes atamasca) being spread out to dry

It was a great experience to meet a group of like-minded interns right off the bat this week, and now I am anticipating getting to know my own NCBG crew a little better.  Of course, as a certifiable plant nerd, I am also pretty excited to learn about new species, visit some of the area herbaria, and start collecting seeds.  This is really a fantastic opportunity to do important and fulfilling work and I don’t plan to waste a minute of it.  Until next time, peace outside.

Emily Driskill

CLM Intern, North Carolina Botanical Garden