The eight months I spent in Eastern Oregon working for the Bureau of Land Management gave me a good amount of time to understand how land management operates within a government organization. Coming from Illinois, and not working for the government before, this was a completely new experience, and worth every moment. Throughout my time at the Vale District BLM, I tried to to take advantage of the wide variety of resources available and learn as much as possible.  This included going to the field with range technicians, range conservationists, soil scientists (NRCS), wildlife biologists, horse and burro specialist, hydrologists, etc., when my mentor gave me the opportunity to do so. Aside from all of the required work, having the opportunity to go out with this wide range staff let me learn so much more than I would have expected.
One of the major skills I took away from the internship is taxonomic identification of a very wide variety of plant species. This will help me in the future, no matter what type of habitat I end up working in. This is a basic skill set that I was not taught in college, unbelievably so, and my mentor took time to help me out with this. Along with that, my navigational skills were immensely improved, both within the backcountry terrain and in general. The main expectations of me and the other intern were to accomplish a set goal of monitoring sensitive plant sites and seed collections. These two tasks taught me about seed viability, the importance of native seed collection, and the proper protocol to efficiently and effectively collect seed. The sensitive plant monitoring taught me how to assess a particular habitat and identify where sensitive plants are likely to occur within a specific location.
A learning experience that stands out to me most is the importance of being prepared for anything while out in the field. While working in extremely remote areas, you ALWAYS have to make sure you have absolutely everything you need before leaving for the field. Along with being prepared, the most important learning experience I will take away from this is to always ask questions even if they might seem ‘stupid’.
My expectation going into the internship was that I would be able to bring together my academic knowledge and other field work experiences in a way that would be very useful in future jobs. I wanted to learn the ins and outs of how everything needs to come together to complete a specific project. My main interest is ecological restoration, so working on restoration project would have been ideal. So, were my expectations met? Yes, but not in the way I originally thought they would be. After getting to the BLM and spending time learning what it was I would be doing for the next couple of months, it turned out I would not have the opportunity to work on a specific restoration project. That is not to say I didn’t get to learn about what I wanted though. Being a part of the Seeds of Success project, I was a part of restorative practices at the beginning level. Also, asking the specialists in the office different questions, I was able to learn more about land management, not just in the restoration realm.
The opportunity to work in a location for an extended period of time, rather than just a typical three month stint, helped me learn a lot more. After reflecting on the internship, I am grateful and appreciative to have had the chance to work in such a beautiful landscape and learn as much as I can while there. The full scope of bringing my academic and field experience together was possible, and I hope it will help me in my next step.

Greetings from Wyoming!

It is -12 degrees F as I write, and has not broken 10 degrees in three days. Kind of a nasty shock for this Southwest girl when I got back from Thanksgiving in Arizona! Needless to say, no more fieldwork for us. The last of the sage collections are in, the pressed plant specimens are off to the Smithsonian and the Rocky Mountain Herbarium, and I am wrapping up the SOS work for this year.

The biggest thing now is to make sure all the loose strings are wrapped up before I leave here. I’m trying to organize all the information we collected and put together some useful tips for the next person. I can tell that the intern before me tried to make things easier for the following year, and I would like to do the same if I can. Anything we can do to make the learning curve less steep. There are also some stray herbarium vouchers from years past that I will try to get documented and moved somewhere safe.

I spent some time talking with the folks at the Rocky Mountain Herbarium this week, and they have done detailed work over an impressive area of the Rocky Mountain West. Wyoming and the mountainous part of Colorado have been covered pretty thoroughly, and they are slowly working their way north. However, there are still blank spots on the map that could use some detailed botanizing. Something to keep in mind for the future.

Time is going way too fast!

Stay warm everybody!

Cheers,
Abby D.

Hello to my fellow CLM interns! November was an interesting month for me as it required a bit of field work, which is unusual for so late in the year. However, the West Eugene Wetlands field office has an ongoing threatened & endangered plant augmentation project in the works, so my botanical cohort and I, with the assistance of the Institute for Applied Ecology, began to lay the groundwork for the project.

We had three empty macroplots that we created earlier this year, all of which would be planted with Kincaid’s Lupine plugs at a later date. First, we had to cover the plots with heavy shade cloth in an attempt to control the invasive grasses that would compete with our T&E species. So we packed up six giant pieces of shade cloth, several hundred wooden stakes, and three sledgehammers, and trekked out to our first macroplot.

I discovered that laying down shade cloth is quite the art form, from folding under the edges of the cloth before pounding the stakes in (to prevent the edges from fraying or unraveling) to pounding the stakes into the ground diagonally (to make them more difficult to remove). Several hours and hundreds of wooden stakes later we were finished with our first macroplot. I find that there is nothing quite so satisfying as being able to look at a finished project and know that you were vital in its accomplishment. And for me, the more challenging the task, the more satisfying the outcome.

Unfortunately, I did miss part of November at the office, as I had my wisdom teeth removed and complications resulting from the surgery took me out for longer than I anticipated. Now, however, I am recovered and happy to be back in the office. Right now I am focusing on entering data into the Geographic Biotic Observations (GeoBOB) database; I am knee deep in plant data going back to the 90s.

Next week may bring more opportunities in the field. We’ve received 500 lupine plugs ready to plant, but Eugene is currently experiencing a cold spell (it was only 15 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived at the field office this morning, which is unusually cold for the Willamette Valley).

Here’s hoping for some warmer weather!