A view up our site, Hot Springs Mountain

Though it’s hard to tell, this pictures shows a wide ditch that opened after a landslide. It will likely facilitate future landslides if not dealt with.

One of our main focuses this week was a restoration site just outside Carson City. The area has seen a number of erosion events in recent years that have caused serious property damage in the nearby residential area. Our goal here is to revegetate the disturbed areas with the hopes of lessening the severity of future landslides.

We seeded two different plants, rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) and fourwing saltbush (Atriplex canescens). Both of these plants occur commonly in the sagebrush scrub community that is typical around here. You may be wondering why we chose these plants instead of the most common plant in sagebrush scrub — which is sagebrush — and we have good reason for this choice. Both rubber rabbitbrush and fourwing saltbush are part of the early successional community; sagebrush is not. This means that rabbitbrush and saltbush are better at colonizing disturbed areas. This is especially important for our project, because we need plants that will be able to establish a root system quickly and stabilize the soil. Additionally, with any restoration project, if you’re trying to reestablish the native plant community, you increase your chances by following nature’s lead. By seeding rabbitbrush and saltbush, we are mimicking the order in which plants would recolonize the area. Hopefully, this will allow the plant community on these disturbed areas to most efficiently develop and blend into the current plant community.

A terrible picture of me using that red contraption in the bottom right corner to spread fourwing saltbush seed

A newly-seeded trail

While in the field, we were approached by a few people who lived in the area and were curious about what we were doing. The first person was interested in the plants we were seeding, stating she would need to look them up later, and was just happy to see us out there doing something to help. However, we were approached by a couple people a bit later, and when we told them what we were seeding, they seemed pretty disappointed and informed us that rabbitbrush causes a lot of people to have allergies. One person stated, “I’d understand sagebrush, but rabbitbrush is just a nuisance.” Caught off guard by this reaction, I apologized about their allergies as they walked away. In my head, I thought about the importance of using rabbitbrush over sagebrush and how the amount of rabbitbrush we’re adding would be insignificant to the amount already present. Afraid to come across as argumentative, I didn’t voice these thoughts and may have missed a chance to inform some people.
Despite the uncomfortable situation, this showed me such a succinct example of something we are told so often, that you can’t please everybody. Even with a project that seems so benign, seeding areas to help stop landslides into people’s houses, there are still ways to disappoint people. This challenge of land management is something I hope to learn to better navigate. Hopefully, if I’m approached in the future by a member of the public who doesn’t agree with the work we’re doing, I can start a friendly conversation with them, not necessarily so that they agree with me, just so they can better understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.

With our mentor Dean away this week for training, the Carson City Botany Interns were planning to spend most of our time in the field, seeding one of our restoration sites, American Flat Mill. However, the snowstorm that passed through the area this past weekend put our plans on hold since it would likely be too muddy to make it to American Flat. With a quick email from Dean Sunday night, we had a new plan for the week – start gathering information and putting together a story map for visitors at another restoration site, Swan Lake.

Entering Swan Lake Nature Study Area

Although we have talked a bit about the restoration work we will be doing at Swan Lake, we had not yet been there and knew little about it. So on Monday the research commenced, and I’ll share with you some of what we have learned.

Officially, it is known as the Swan Lake Nature Study Area. Over 150 bird species have been sighted here, so it is unsurprising that the Audubon Society designated Swan Lake as a Nevada Important Bird Area. It hosts birds that live here year round and is an important stop for migratory birds. The lake’s namesake is one of these migratory birds, the tundra swan.

What is so amazing is that Swan Lake is nestled in between a mix of commercial and residential areas. In fact, its primary water source is the Reno-Stead Wastewater Treatment Plant. And this is not an accident. About twenty years ago, local birders recognized the importance of Swan Lake and started working to protect it. Part of this protection was guaranteeing that water would be here year round, especially during years of drought, so the effluent from the nearby treatment plant was diverted to Swan Lake.

This is only a small bit of what makes Swan Lake interesting; I could go on for a lot longer. I could tell you how the Washoe have lived around and subsisted off of resources from Swan Lake for 9000 years or that Swan Lake is a shallow playa marsh and its surface area shrinks from 1000 acres at normal water levels to 200 acres during dry years. I could also talk about a few of my favorite topics, the importance of wetlands like Swan Lake in nutrient cycles and the roles of plants and microbes in these cycles. BUT I’m not going to. First of all, that would be too much information, and second, we want you to come to Swan Lake and learn these things from the story map we’re making.

As you might imagine, we really wanted to see this place, and since it’s so close to developed areas, unlike our other site, we didn’t have to worry about getting stuck in the mud. So we went! Maybe naively, I was imagining a beautiful, green wetland teeming with birds. When we arrived, I realized that Swan Lake, like pretty much everywhere else in the area, was covered in snow (and/or ice).

Since parts of Swan Lake are densely vegetated with cattails and bulrush, snow cover makes it difficult to tell that a wetland is here

And the areas that were not vegetated were covered with a thin layer of ice

So it wasn’t as green as I was imagining, or as abundantly filled with birds, but it definitely was still beautiful. We spotted a few birds – a hawk, a couple marsh wrens, and a skein of Canada geese. Walking around, seeing all of the senesced cattails and bulrush, I only got more excited about the nutrient cycles I had been thinking about. I also got more excited about what this place will look like as the year progresses.

Besides the story map and restoration work we will be doing out here, we are also going to develop a lesson plan for a local fourth grade class. Hopefully, we will be able to convey how awesome Swan Lake is and how lucky they are to have this natural resource so close to home.

Alec
Carson City BLM