Statue of Botany

I’m starting my second year as a CLM intern in New Mexico.  Last year I worked in the Chihuahuan desert.  This year I’ll be working in the Colorado Plateau portion of the state.  We are working out of the NRCS Plant Materials Center in Los Lunas, NM.  I am very optimistic this year, as we are having a significantly wetter year.  Although I gained wonderful experience last year while working out of the Las Cruces, NM  BLM, we had to accept the whims of Mother Nature and had rather poor seed production due to the drought.  We have spent the first weeks scoping out potential collection areas and learning the species of the region.  This is the first year that SOS interns have worked in this area, so in some ways we are treading new ground.  The opportunity to work in a different part of the state has certainly broadened my botanical knowledge.  The large geographic range that I have been lucky to explore here in New Mexico has helped to get a very visceral idea of species ranges, assemblages and ecologies.  We are getting off to a good start and I look forward to blogging more on our adventures and insights as the summer progresses.