A series of photographs taken in several wetlands in the eastern Sierras over the last several months.

Athyrium filix-femina var. cyclosorum, the feminine fern, photographed roughly 100 yards from the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe. This fellow was living atop a single rock stuck fast in the creek bottom.

Athyrium filix-femina var. cyclosorum, the feminine fern.

Athyrium filix-femina var. cyclosorum, showing developing sori.

Circaea alpina spp. pacifica, a beautiful little member of the evening primrose family. This growing very near to the Athyrium photographed above.

Circaea alpina ssp. pacifica, Pacific enchanter’s nightshade.

Circaea alpina ssp. pacifica, Pacific enchanter’s nightshade, flower closeup.

The Sierra rein orchid.

Platanthera dilatata var. leucostachys, the Sierra rein orchid.

Little elephant head, Pedicularis groenlandica. This species has a very wide distribution – from southwestern Greenland, across northern North America, as far south as montane areas of northern Arizona. This individual was photographed in a wet meadow in the Mt. Rose Wilderness, just to the west of Reno, Nevada.

Pedicularis groenlandica, the little elephant head.

Upon close inspection, the land was determined to be wet. This waterfall feeds the creek that wets the marsh in which I found the above photographed Pedicularis.

A partial rainbow in a waterfall.

Common garden experiments, a type of study in which individuals from distinct populations of a species are grown side-by-side, have provided a great deal of evidence to support the position that populations adapt their phenology and resource allocation strategy to local conditions. Environmental conditions that may vary across a species’ range include average annual temperature, minimum and maximum temperatures, timing and amount of precipitation, ratio of precipitation to evaporative losses, associated plants and animals, and soil characteristics. Some aspects of phenology and resource allocation strategies that may evolve include timing of germination, flowering, fruiting, or senescing, number of flowers, seed number and mass, and ratio of aboveground to belowground biomass. Adaptation to a given set of conditions may hinder survival under a different set of conditions, hence the need to collect and make available to restorationists seed from a wide variety of locally adapted populations of a given species.

[Lewisia rediviva, the bitterroot]

The bitterroot, Lewisia rediviva, offers a good case study of a plant that lives in widely separated areas which receive precipitation in very different amounts and at very different times. While the plant is reported from all western states and British Columbia and Alberta, I’ll make a short study of only three reported populations (Coconino co., AZ, Humboldt co., NV, San Joaquin co., CA) that experience a range of conditions across the southwestern United States. The Arizona population, reported from near the south rim of the Grand Canyon, receives roughly 16 inches of rain per year spread over a winter and a late summer rainy season. The Nevada population, reported from near Winnemucca in Humboldt Co., receives roughly 8 inches of rain per year, almost entirely in the winter. The California population, reported from northeast of Stockton in San Joaquin co., receives roughly 14 inches of rain per year, almost entirely in the winter. While it does not appear that any common-garden studies of this species have been conducted, it does seems unlikely that an individual from a population that is adapted to high rainfall (i.e. an individual from the south rim of the Grand Canyon) would prosper under the much more arid conditions around Winnemucca, NV. In the same vein, an individual transplanted from San Joaquin co., CA, which lacks a summer monsoon, might not prosper when planted among the south rim population due to a lack of adaptation to the local timing of rainfall.

[L. rediviva on high, dry ridge – the small white forms in the center are Lewisia flowers]

Freedom, though not necessarily ease, of movement over expanses of land allows for a far more visceral understanding of the lives of wild animals and plants than could any amount of reading. The two ways of knowing are, of course, deeply and necessarily complimentary, but not until a student of nature has moved for a time across a landscape wide enough to allow them to experience and negotiate a variety of environments and conditions will they have more that an abstract understanding of the lives and histories of the place’s inhabitants.

(The Clan Alpine Mountains, Churchill co., NV, from the floor of Dixie Valley)

A student of biogeography, one interested in the peculiar distribution of a montane species in the the basin and range province offers a useful illustration of this complimentarity. A review of the literature concerning this hypothetical species shows that it hasn’t been recorded beneath about 7000 feet in elevation. Strangely, though, not all areas above 7000 feet in the region harbor this species. Why? Clearly the hot, alkaline basins surrounding montane areas in this region are insurmountable barriers to migration.

(Equisetum sp., in Ash Canyon, Carson City, Nevada)

A long hike or drive on dirt roads from ridge to ridge via an intervening basin, taken with plenty of water but with no books, lays the foundation for this abstract answer to become a visceral understanding of what is, of how things operate. The mountain air where the species is found cools the sweat on the brow while the basin’s hot wind leaves skin dry and with an accumulation of gritty salt and dust. The distances involved, easily laid out on a map, are more comprehensible from the point of view of a wild thing after half an hour of bouncing across a dirt road brings only a small change to one’s view of a distant ridge.

(A violet in a a sunny ponderosa pine woodland)