Dear Reader,

Well, it’s my last week in Winnemucca! As is always the way with time, six months have gone by awfully fast, while simultaneously containing so many experiences, new things learned, and good memories. It’s hard to say goodbye!

One of the things I learned here is that no matter where you go, you’ll be happy if you like the people around you. I really enjoyed the place and job besides that, but the people I met in Nevada, both on the job and off, are the most important thing! For someone like me who gets caught up in the doing, the planning and carrying out and accomplishing of goals, that’s a valuable reminder. These types of reminders often jump out at me more at the ends of things, like after graduating from high school, at the ends of sports seasons, when saying goodbye to friends for who knows how long. Similarly, it was really great at the end of this job to be reminded of all the people who have supported me this season, in Winnemucca, Reno, the CBG, and beyond. I’m very thankful for all of the people who showed me the ropes, were patient with me, gave me responsibilities and trusted me, brought me out in the field with them, and contributed to the sense of community I felt here.

The Santa Rosa Ranger District Office is small but tight-knit and reminds me of the Forest Service office my dad works at on the Superior National Forest in northern MN, even though the two places are so far away. In my very first blog post I talked about how I was struck by the abundance of land to manage and work to be done, coupled with a lack of resources and people to work on all of it. After six months here, that is still my impression––and of course I’m realizing that this is not a problem specific to Nevada, but it’s the place where I gained a more firsthand awareness of this challenge (and it’s certainly pronounced here!).

Thinking about land and land management in the Western U.S. was one of the many valuable learning experiences I gained from this job. I frequently think about whose land I’m on in a way that I did not before coming here. I also learned so much about what land management and conservation look like in the Western U.S., from the invasive plants that are a problem here to drought and fire challenges to the ways that different agencies work together to thinking about cattle and grazing and how important fostering good relationships with ranchers is…I think one hopeful thing is that a lot of stakeholders (federal and state agencies, NGOs, universities, private landowners like ranchers…) have common goals of being good stewards for this abundance of land. Every time I saw folks from different agencies collaborate during my job, they were so enthusiastic to compare notes, looking for ways to work together, share knowledge, and be on the same page.

Collaborating with other people, be it other SOS interns, BLM, NDOW, NRCS, and beyond, was one of the highlights of my job as well, for the reasons mentioned above of watching people collaborate and for what I could learn from all of them about their respective jobs and the ecosystems we worked in, and in the case of the Reno SOS interns, become friends with them! I plan to stay in contact with many of the people I met over the course of my time here, and I hope to come back to the area to visit and will definitely look at some grad schools in the western U.S. when the time comes. I will miss the practical, kind and friendly people, the sunny summer, the low-to-the-ground, highly adapted vegetation, Nevada’s network of parallel mountain ranges, the sunrises and sunsets, the hot springs, my walks around Winnemucca, my coworkers and friends, and so much more about this place. I do feel like I’ve had an abundance of time to reflect on things, and I hope I’m taking full advantage of it because I really appreciate what the last six months have brought me. First post-undergrad job and life experience in the books, and it’s exciting to be thinking about all the future awesome things that could potentially happen, but also sad as always to look back on a good chapter that’s ending.

Hi CLM blog! It’s November and it’s my second-to-last post––crazy but inevitable and it’s been a good season. I won’t get into the season reflection right now, so stay tuned for that next week. For now I’ll let you know how it’s been going at the tail end of my season from late October to early November.

Last time I talked about re-seeding disturbed areas in the Santa Rosas. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot more non-fieldwork, as snow starting to appear at higher elevations has meant that some of the forest roads are becoming less safe for driving. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of end-of-the-season things––data management and entry for Seeds of Success, mounting specimens of the plants I collected seeds from this season, and organizing the Santa Rosa Ranger District’s herbarium collection.

For SOS data management, the main thing of note is the geospatial data entry, which I think is interesting because it can be helpful to future SOS interns in Nevada. Basically, I added points to a map showing where and when I collected various species this summer, and also where I’d scouted but didn’t collect due to poor timing that looked promising for future seasons. Interns each year can look at this map and access a multitude of ideas for where to scout and collect seeds!

The other most interesting things I’ve been doing are the specimen mounting and herbarium organizing. For mounting plants, what you’re doing is gluing pressed, dried plant specimens, along with an informational label, to large pieces of paper so other people can look at them for species identification, records of where species have been found over time, and other purposes! (Some specimens also just look pretty cool.) The part I liked best, however, was actually organizing the office’s herbarium collection (like a plant librarian!). Basically, almost all of the collection’s over 500 plant specimens were being stored in cardboard boxes, not organized, and it was my job to go through them, organizing them alphabetically by family, genus, and species, and moving them to a cabinet they were intended to be stored in. It might sound boring depending on the type of person you are, but for me it was fun to see lots of Northern Nevada plant specimens, most of them collected in the Santa Rosa and Mountain City-Jarbidge Districts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest from 1974-1975 by Mont and Ethel Lewis, who I can only assume were a botanizing couple! I also liked getting to review and learn new plant families, and bring order to the chaos so the herbarium collection can actually serve its purpose as a useful reference for people at the office in the future.

Other than work, I’m enjoying fall in Winnemucca, and feeling sad that my term is almost up, but also feeling grateful and enriched by the time I’ve spent here.

Hi CLM blog,

What’s new with you? For me, the end of September and first part of October have brought some changes, at work and in general. The end of September marked the end of the two Reno Seeds of Success crews’ terms, so I had to say goodbye to the four of them (in a professional context at least), which was sad. Working (and hanging out outside of work!) with them was the highlight of my September, and I’m hopeful that we will remain friends even when we don’t have plants and seeds to look for together! I’m going to visit a couple of these cool people this weekend so I’m optimistic.

Now that the seeds are almost completely dispersed for most species, I’ve started working on some other things. I made a tissue sample collection for Machaeranthera (/Dieteria) canescens at Angel Lake, and got to enjoy the fall colors and dense fog up there, which was cool to see. Lots more moisture than the atmosphere had contained for many months was hanging over the tops of the mountains, and at higher elevations like Angel Lake you could get pretty much engulfed by it!

In October a few cloudy systems have moved through Winnemucca also, and the mountains around town have been intermittently snowy, which I’ve really enjoyed. Maybe it’s just that I’m a Midwestern person who has rarely seen that, but having snow on the tops of the mountains gives them more definition and helps me notice peaks in the distance that I’d scanned over without really seeing when they were snow-free. I also learned that tumbleweeds, once dry, can clump together to form aggregations several feet long across four-wheeler trails, which added a kooky obstacle on one of my runs last week (of course, after googling the phenomenon, I learned that what I experienced was on the small end of the spectrum of tumbleweed aggregations!). In general I’m really appreciating being cold sometimes after a hot summer––much more what I’m accustomed to.

The other main thing I’ve been doing for work is some re-seeding of disturbed areas in the Santa Rosas. There are some heavily grazed and fire-affected areas along the Quinn River near the northern edge of the Santa Rosas, and I’ve been bringing bags of seed mix up and broadcasting it over these disturbed areas. Hopefully this will help some native grasses and forbs take root in this semi-bare, dry ground.

If it was seed conservation summer, now it’s ecosystem restoration autumn. I’m excited to see what comes next as the seasons keep changing.

Bye for now!

Emma

Hi CLM blog, happy September!

My September has been eventful in terms of work and the fun of meeting new friends on the job! This month I’ve been working with two Seeds of Success crews based out of Reno on two separate hitches. It’s been a great experience, being part of a team of five rather than a solo intern like I am usually. The routines of longer hitches that can span much of the state over several days contrast the single-day trip, Santa Rosas-focused seed collecting that I do when I’m on my own and it is cool to have been able to see both ways of working over the past few months. Here I’m going to share a lot of pictures and some of the things working with Grace, Hannah, Jenna, and Amy helped me reflect on!

1 – Being flexible

Being flexible helped make our first September hitch a successful trip. We changed our travel plans fairly last-minute to avoid the fires in California and then again to avoid the smoke blowing across Nevada, and both decisions paid off as we were able to conduct worthwhile fieldwork in safe areas and less smoky locations. The plan we decided on involved mainly scouting for and monitoring rare plants at sites across Nevada, traveling in a counterclockwise loop around the state and working in the Austin-Tonopah District and the Ely District of the Humboldt-Toibyabe National Forest, Great Basin National Park, and the Ruby Mountains. In perfect symmetry with Sierra’s and my earlier trip to the Bull Run Mountains with Jerry Tiehm and Jan Nachlinger, the two species we surveyed on this trip were Eriogonum tiehmii––Tiehm’s Buckwheat––and Silene nachlingerae––Nachlinger’s Catchfly––both rare species. E. tiehmii is a very rare species that grows in a small area that is the site of a proposed lithium mining project, so the species is pretty threatened (it may get added to a list of threatened/endangered species; stay tuned because this is a contentious issue). One of our crewmembers, Jenna, is studying the evolution and speciation of the Silene genus for her Master’s research and this was the last Silene species she had yet to find and collect data on in Nevada, which we were able to do on this trip! It was cool to do some rare plant work as a change of pace from collecting seeds on this trip.

2 – When to take risks and when to back off

On the same hitch we encountered both roads on which we proceeded with caution and roads that we decided to turn back from. Our big success for challenging road navigation was near Great Basin National Park, climbing a road with extremely tight switchbacks (we’re talking having to reverse the truck after making half the curve to get the rest of the way around it, and doing this for at least ten switches one way) that maxed out at around 10,000 feet in elevation for some Silene scouting (of course I was especially proud of getting to the top, since I was the one driving!). In contrast to this achievement, we faced an unassuming, sandy road we hoped to use to access another Silene population in the southern Ruby Mountains and after cautiously heading out on it for a few miles, decided to turn around because the truck was handling poorly on the sandy surface. You win some, you lose some when sites are remote and accessible only via roads that can be hit or miss depending on the conditions. It’s satisfying to get to the top, but it’s not worth getting stuck or busting up your truck either! Operating with slightly more caution than I do when it’s only my judgement determining what I do was a good check for me that I hope will be on my mind in future situations.

3 – Building a successful trip around both work and fun

The Reno crew of Jenna and Amy took the lead on planning for both these trips, which I appreciated, and learning the ways that both these crews operate on their longer hitches was a new experience for me, namely having a group of fun and nice people both to work with and to hang out with after hours in the great outdoors. They introduced me to one of the joys of Nevada SOS work that I’d heard tell of but so far missed out on––hot springs. And they were just as awesome as everyone had said! We visited three different hot springs on our first hitch and found them all fairly quiet, with only a few other visitors if any. All were warm but varied in temperature, developed-ness, water clarity, and ecosystem type. One was more developed with a concrete hot tub installed to hold some of the spring water, one had very clear water and flowed from a snaking hot creek into a marsh, and one was in a valley with a mud flat-type ecosystem. All had great views of the stars. The most memorable hot spring experience for me was the second one, which was home to minnows that liked eating dead skin while you were sitting in the water. Specifically, I will never forget the feeling of a small fish taking one of my more protruding armpit-adjacent moles (lots of us have those, right??) in its raspy mouth and shaking it back and forth insistently, like a dog with a chew toy. Just like you were at a spa.

We had plenty of other after-work fun too, including playing cards, telling stories, taking hikes, and generally enjoying each other’s company! I was so thankful to get to know a group of such friendly, open, and interesting women and both work and just hang out with them. It was also amazing seeing what dynamic duos each of the two crews were; I couldn’t believe how lucky they (and their supervisors) got when hiring crews for this season––in both teams the co-interns complemented each other well, and were great at communicating, getting along, and having a good time with each other, all of which makes any job much more enjoyable! I was also super glad that these dynamics expanded to make a well-functioning and happy team of five.

And that was my last few weeks! Next week I will be leading a collecting trip with a couple of SOS interns from Boise, so I’m hopeful that will be another fun and learning-filled experience.

Lastly, a moment to thank the folks at the Forest Service in Winnemucca where I’m based:

-Thanks to Boyd for being my check-in person the last few weeks(/months?) and for always being a chill and reliable presence at the office.

-Thanks to Wendy for helping me mail my seed collections even when she’s working on a fire in another state!

-Thanks to Sierra for trusting me to do my own thing while she’s been working on fires and for the super nice write up in the local Humboldt County newspaper! 🙂

Hi CLM blog!

The last few times I checked in I got to share about all manner of interesting things I was doing, namely botany camping trips, native plant conferences, and bat surveys. Now I’m checking in with an update that is a little bit more in line with my job description! In late July, my supervisor Sierra got the chance to go work on the Tamarack fire south of Lake Tahoe as a Resource Advisor, and I got to start Seeds of Success collecting pretty independently. It was a little intimidating starting out but I got comfortable with the protocol after a few seed collections! There is a list of priority species that are desired for collection in the Great Basin, but with the heat and dryness that the area is experiencing, finding any plant population with enough seeds to collect is a win, and opportunistic collections of any native species we can find are also fair game. So far I’ve gotten seeds from Helianthella uniflora, Stipa thurberiana, Pseudoroegneria spicata, Phacelia hastata, Eriogonum heracleoides, and Arnica sororia––a fun mix of native forbs and grasses. It’s been great getting familiar with some new species and figuring out identification for ones I don’t know!

So far, all my seed collections have been in the Santa Rosas north of Winnemucca, and I’ve gotten to see a lot of new country up in that area, including Buttermilk Meadows, Holloway Meadows, Solid Silver, and Buckskin. Those names won’t mean much to anyone not familiar with the area, but in case any northern Nevadans are reading this! I kept hoping to do some work over by Elko, NV, but thunderstorms and then subsequent landslides have kept me away from the area so far. I’m hopeful that next week the forest roads will be safe enough again to head over and see what seeds are left there!

Besides native plants, I’ve seen many cool rock formations and animals the past few weeks. I saw 11 antelope in a group just between the town of Paradise Valley and the foot of the Santa Rosas, which was surprising to me––I’d never seen a group together like that before, just one or two! I’ve also seen lots of chukars, grouse, and quail with their new families that have hatched over the summer, plus some lizards and a few praying mantises. Still no snakes though.

My family also visited from Minnesota the past week so I got to see my parents and sister and show them around for a few days. It was pretty smoky but they loved seeing Hinkey Summit in the Santa Rosas and swimming in Lake Tahoe! We even saw three bighorn sheep on Hinkey which was a first for me; I’m glad they were there for it.

Until next time here’s hoping we all, if not stay cool, at least enjoy the cooler evenings and late summer sunsets 🙂

Emma

Hi CLM blog!

The past few weeks have been plenty interesting and I’m excited to tell you about them! Last time I posted was after the Eriogonum Society conference, and since then, my main work highlight has been going on a mini bat blitz over in Elko. The bat blitz was a departure from plant work but in the interest of being a well-rounded ecologist it was a great thing to do (plus I just really love bats)! I went out in the Jarbidge-Ruby Mountain Ranger District of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, and in the Ruby Mountain RD near the Medicine Range for this trip, which was led by a team of BLM ecologists based in Elko. The team was interdisciplinary and interagency, which was awesome, and also included a biologist who specializes in abandoned mining land reclamation, a biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW), and a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. It was awesome to work with such a wide range of people from different agencies and backgrounds for the week––I learned a lot from them about bat monitoring but also about how their different organizations can work together. 

I also learned more about the area’s ecology, and one thing in particular that was interesting was learning about the effects of wild horses on sagebrush scrub ecosystems in Nevada. The wild horses running around the landscape are not native (they were introduced by the Spanish colonizing the Americas), and although they look awesome running free they actually cause a lot of damage to the ecosystem. It turns out that when they dig in springs as they try to access more water, they end up drying up the springs instead, and they degrade native vegetation and habitats. Land management organizations have a difficult time managing them, however, because some groups’ love for the animals translates to strong resistance to management efforts (we’re talking death threats, even to a grad student doing their PhD on the impacts of wild horses). I knew nothing about this conflict and challenge in western land management, as someone from Minnesota, but thinking about how to effectively manage land when stakeholders have different levels of knowledge about it and relationships with it is relevant across settings and contexts. I appreciated adding a dimension to what I know about Great Basin ecology as well.

Charismatic megafauna aside, the actual bat blitz was very cool! We set up acoustic monitors at several sites (basically microphones at the top of long poles) that would be left up for about a week to record bat calls that can later be analyzed in the lab using software designed to identify bat species by their distinct calls. This software can make tentative identifications but it’s up to the biologists to go through and make final ID decisions. It was awesome to learn that bat calls are a useful way to assess species richness in an area, and impressive to watch people who were familiar with identifying species by their calls that way. This year there was no bat netting to take physical data, due to concerns about possibly passing COVID-19 to bat populations in the state, but in other years netting is the best way to confidently identify species (although there are tradeoffs with time, resources, etc. that can make acoustic monitoring versus capture a better decision depending on the situation). 

We also did roost exit counts a few nights, where some team members used night vision goggles to watch a roost entrance and said “one in”, “one out”, etc. while other team members kept track of how many bats had entered and exited their roost with counters. This could give an idea of bat activity at specific roosts on a given night, and can be paired with acoustic data collected at the same location to identify the species active there (and potentially what species are roosting there!). The roosts in question on our trip were old mineshafts and tunnels. It was really interesting to see the abandoned mining lands and how the old mines here look and become part of the landscape compared. I was mentally comparing this type of former mining land with the way old iron mining landscapes in northern Minnesota where I’m from look––it’s a lot different, with MN Iron Range minelands now largely converted to minepits filled in with fresh water, steep hills of waste rock dotted with trees, and orangish dirt in some places. Here I’m still learning about it, but the marks of mining on the landscape are a lot different, with lots of small and intriguing but dangerous entrances to underground mines, and no doubt more that I hope I learn to recognize as the season goes on. 

Hi! I’m Emma Greenlee, and I’m a CLM intern based out of Winnemucca, Nevada this year. I moved out here a few weeks ago as I was finishing my last finals period at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Now that I’m settled in and have been at work for a few weeks, I’m here to report what I’ve done and learned so far!

I’m working for the Forest Service on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, which is the lower 48’s largest national forest, spanning Nevada and some of California. I’m stationed at the Santa Rosa Ranger District in Winnemucca, and am working primarily with Sierra Sampson, the zone botanist for the northeast part of the forest. So far I have liked the Forest Service vibe (maps on all the walls, animal skulls and other natural specimens everywhere, and kind people who know and care about the area) a lot, while also seeing the challenges of working in an understaffed and underfunded office with more land to manage than time and resources to accomplish everything. Sierra is awesome and I’m excited to work with her and hopefully other people around the district and forest.

After a week of training on noxious weeds, UTV operation, herbicide application, and common invasive species identification, Sierra and I drove to the Bull Run Mountains, a range north of Elko, NV near the Idaho border on the Mountain City Ranger District, to meet two botanists from the University of Nevada-Reno (Jerry Tiehm and Jan Nachlinger). Jerry and Jan are prolific botanists who have been collecting specimens for UNR and other institutions’ herbariums for decades together and it was very cool to get an introduction to subalpine and northern Nevada flora from them. I have a very long ways to go but I was able to commit at least some species to memory and start to recognize others and think about how the plant communities in this area are organized. We camped with those guys for several days and then went our separate ways to spend one last night camping in the Ruby Mountains east of Elko. The Rubies were a stunning mountain range that I was surprised wasn’t a national park! (And that’s how everybody knew I wasn’t from here…) Sierra and I saw a few marmots and a last awesome sunset of the trip and I jumped in the stream running through Lamoille Canyon. I can’t remember how cold Lake Superior is anymore but this felt like it came close!

Throughout the trip I saw Sierra take the time to build positive relationships whether it was with seasoned botanists, campground hosts, or members of the public. Although I’d thought about the role of land stewards like the FS in interacting with diverse stakeholders, I hadn’t thought about how this might play out in small, everyday interactions like Sierra demonstrated, so this was a small but important part of the trip that I will keep thinking about along with all the new species of Eriogonum (wild buckwheat) I learned. I also have a soft spot for geology and I’m dying to get my hands on a copy of Roadside Geology of Nevada after all the amazing rock features of northern NV I saw this week.

Until next time!

Emma

USFS-Santa Rosa Ranger District, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest