Author Archives: Ivy Woltering

Fires and Floras

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If you haven’t heard the news, fire season has hit Oregon hard this month, especially with the so-called “megafires”. And just our luck, Emma and I are stationed in a county surrounded on all sides by these megafires (multiple over 100,000 acres and spreading), with our town, John Day, right smack dab in the center.

Collecting seed above the smoke line, just North of the Strawberry Wilderness, looking out towards John Day, OR

For the most part, this means that we’re pretty safe in town, but the threat to the forest is great, and some nearby towns aren’t faring nearly as well. As such, we’ve had to keep a close eye on local conditions, avoiding certain areas of the forest, driving above the smoke line, and finding work to do indoors (there’s plenty).

My nightly social media doomscrolling has been replaced by excessively checking WatchDuty (10/10, highly recommend this wildfire app, by the way) for the latest hotspots, evacuation zones, AQI, and firefighting updates. Watching the 20,000 acre Courtrock Fire boundary slowly overtake the entirety of our vast (and only) Iris missouriensis population was heartbreaking.

Emma and I escaping the smoke in a subalpine meadow atop Dixie Butte

Early on in the month, on a particularly smoky day, Emma and I set off to scout Dixie Butte. Of course, we had some target species in mind, and we did map a few populations, but I’d be lying if I said we didn’t have an ulterior motive: escape the wildfire smoke. At the top of the Butte, after a long, winding drive, we were met with a lovely subalpine meadow and perfectly clear air. We ate lunch, enjoyed the view/easy breathing, and grabbed some data points before heading off back down the mountain.

Unfortunately, we’ve also had to spend a lot of our days indoors. There’s a ton of work to do, organizing our data, keying out vouchers, weighing out samples, etc., and the days definitely drag on a bit more than when we’re out in the field.

A typical office-day desk set-up:
Excel Spreadsheet, Triple Beam Balance, and an Iced Lavender London Fog

A lot of the indoor work has come down to organization, and it took a while to really nail down our rhythm, especially since we have 3 seasonal Forest Service employees and occasionally 2 SCA interns helping us collect on a regular basis – maybe a few too many cooks in the kitchen, at times.

Right now, these are the steps we’ve been (mostly) following:

Make-shift fumigation center with bags and pest-strips, currently treating 310g of Carex sheldonii
  1. Freshly collected seeds are labelled and weighed to get wet-mass
  2. Seeds are fumigated for 48 hours in sealed plastic bags with insecticide pest-strips
  3. Seeds are set out to dry, usually in the same paper bag for convenience sake, but sometimes in makeshift boxes, which are easier to stack and allow more airflow
  4. Cut tests are performed, as soon as time allows
  5. After a couple weeks of drying, seeds are re-weighed to get dry-mass, and the number of seeds per gram is counted
Cereal-turned-drying box: finally an excuse to eat sugar for breakfast everyday
Shelf of drying seeds
Another shelf of drying seeds
My original, desperate attempt at containing loose, drying seeds
Dissecting scope station

In between these steps, we’re also keying out vouchers, organizing data, double-checking labels, tinkering with our map, planning field days, and fluffing the drying seed. It’s a lot of little tasks adding up to huge piles of work. Honestly, its probably a good thing that the smoke has forced us inside to deal with it all.

In other news, if you read my previous post on Delphinium sp., my mystery Delphinium turned out to be D. Depauperatum, as the little black seeds showed obvious, pale wings…

Delphinium depauperatum seeds and chaffe…on the floor

… Unfortunately, I managed to promptly dump them out onto the floor, where they couldn’t be recovered without risk of invasive contamination. We picked them up with tape, threw all of that into a new bag, and back onto the shelf it went …

… we’ll deal with it later...

Delphinium Daydreams

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Emma as “iPad Kid”

On day one, after a quick office tour and without any real sense of scale or direction in the Malheur National Forest, Emma and I hit the ground running. Immediately after being shown our desk, we got to work building out spreadsheets, setting up data maps, and desperately trying to plan the unplan-able.

At first, our list of target species seemed relatively puny – totally manageable. Now, it seems monstrous. How do just two people scout nearly 2 million acres?

Luckily, Emma and I work well together. We’ve fallen into a bit of a rhythm in the field: Emma is the iPad kid – a whiz at dropping points, measuring population extents, taking photos, and generally managing our data maps. Meanwhile, I’ve found myself spending most of my time rolling in the dirt, mumbling to myself about flowers, and managing our vouchers. It’s the perfect team!

One of our first big finds: a sprawling population of a fruiting Delphinium. Because of it’s widespread, yet pocketed nature, we opted to take multiple vouchers “just in case” . Of course, we knew they would be identical…

Two Delphinium sp. vouchers waiting for species confirmation

… unfortunately, the key had other plans.

Did you know that Delphinium nuttalianum and Delphinium depauperatum look nearly identical and often grow intermixed? Did you know the only surefire way to tell them apart is whether or not their seeds are “winged”? We didn’t!

We’re still not sure which species we’re working with (potentially both?). Unfortunately, I don’t take too kindly to being strung along. I want answers, and I want to be confident in them. I desperately searched field guides, online floras, and herbarium photos for more clues. Nothing.

Even now, after resigning myself to waiting for the seeds, I’m still thinking about those Delphinium, just in the back of my mind. Am I stressed about it? Not at all. But am I itching to check those seeds? Absolutely.

Here’s hoping they start seeding soon!