My transition from British Columbia to Washington over the past few weeks has been positive and exciting – filled with hikes in the sagebrush hills and some serious botanizing!

My main projects so far have involved rare plant detecting. We (I and a fellow intern, Rosemary) just got back from a few days of camping and rare plant monitoring down in the foothills of the Blue Mountains (southeastern corner of the state).  The days leading up to this field week consisted of looking over field reports and sightings from other botanists, some with Washington Rare Plant Care and the BLM, in order to ensure we were targeting the right places. Many of the sites and plant communities we read about had not been visited since the 1990s! We were on the hunt for a small list of threatened plant species, including Lomatian rollinsii and Ribes ceruem var. colubrium. And…hurray! We found a larger population than expected. Here’s a shot of a wee Lomatium:

Apart from plant work, I’ve had some great interactions with local people.  Some of the more interesting ones have been those with ranchers. I am finding myself progressively more interested in the importance of people in conservation and land management issues. My favorite part of this internship so far has been working with a wide variety of professionals and interest groups in land management. Although focusing on botany, I really enjoy seeing how all these different fields and skills come together in a complimentary way, with the end goal of responsible management and stewardship. I’m really seeing public understanding and acceptance as a large gateway to healthier ecosystems.

Looking forward to many more great weeks ahead.  Happy trails to all of you!

Spring is here and many beautiful flowers are greeting us with their wonderful colors and shapes. It has been an eventful month and much has been done here pertaining to field work. We were able to survey for and gain some new information on Ivesia webberi, which is a threatened species and near being listed. That was a very interesting plant and it makes quite a show when you see it up close. The days have been very nice here and the winds of the Sierra Nevada Mountains help make the days quite joyous. It has been nice to simply listen to the wind as it flows across the landscape through the sagebrush and junipers. Also some new friends have arrived in the sagebrush preparing for the nesting season: Spizella breweri; Brewer’s Sparrow. They have quite a buzzy tune and are wonderful to listen to and watch as they proclaim their song across the landscape. The Desert Horned Lizard, Phyrnosoma platyrhinos, is a very interesting and amazing creature to behold. They have an incredibly cryptic coloration to their scales and also they have a interesting technique they use to blend in to the environment.  It’s called shimmy burial! They shimmy into the soil and cover all of their body except for their head, helping them to prey on one of their main food items; ants.

Enjoy the beautiful season of spring my friends,

Ethan

Carson City Field Office-BLM

Rain passing over us in a heavy cistern

Cardinal direction eastern

Yellow is the color of the young

Agoseris. Lomatium.

Digging them up like a Piaute or a Wasco

Roots clenched. Basalt flow.

Before I know it you’ll become crinkled ribbons

A brown remembrance given

And sent away into a manila envelope

Epithets. Scientific trope.

A memory

A reverberated chord of Big Sky Bend.

Continue reading →

Last week we headed out to the remote Eureka Valley in the northwest corner of Death Valley National Park to collect data on two endemic species – Swallenia alexandrae (Eureka Valley dune grass) and Oenothera californica ssp. eurekensis (Eureka Valley Evening Primrose) – which are both federally listed as endangered species. It was gorgeous there, but it was also one of the hottest places I’ve ever been! I’ve been told (many times) “it’s only going to get worse”, so I tried to go along with the idea that we were actually experiencing fairly mild temperatures while we were there. Anyway, the views from atop the dunes and getting to work with these beautiful endemic plant species definitely made it all worth it!

We went to three different sites in Eureka Valley – Eureka Dune, Saline Spur, and Marble Canyon. Eureka Dune was absolutely breathtaking! It is the tallest sand dune in the state of California, rising more than 680 feet above the lake bed at its base. At each site we located tagged Swallenia alexandrae and Oenothera californica ssp. eurekensis and recorded data on their growth and reproductive effort; these plants are being monitored over a three-year period, with this being the second year of data collection. Swallenia alexandrae has a dense root system which catches and holds drifting sand, thus forming stable hummocks that can be found even on the steepest slopes of the dunes. Using our GPS units, we traversed up and down dunes searching for our study plants, which were sometimes high up on these steep slopes. It was definitely an adventure! 

the large, white night-blooming flowers of the Eureka Valley evening primrose (pollinated by moths!!)

Eureka Valley evening primrose in bloom!

orange sea of blooming Sphaeralcea ambigua (if you recall from my last blog post – one of the species we planted at our “common garden” sites!) <3

satellite image of the Eureka dune!

Eureka Dune under the setting sun

Happy Earth Day! Thanks for reading!

– Meaghan

Las Vegas Field Office, USGS

As snow melts throughout much of the American Northeast, Southeastern Arizona is experiencing its second wave of spring. The first wildflowers have come and gone. Cottonwoods flowered over a month ago and many weeks have passed since they first set fruit. Winter rainfall brought the first wave, the fabulous Arizona heat leads the way for the next wave of flowers and their associated pollinators.

Rains grace the Santa Rita Mountains

The added moisture allows plants to put energy into creating flowers to reproduce all along the elevational gradient.

Fallugia paradoxa (Apache plume)

More flowers means more nectar for pollinators. Pollinators become abundant in the profusion of food.

Oenothera spp. (Evening Primrose)

More pollinators (bees/butterflies/hummingbirds/moths/bats) means that there is a larger readily available food source for other creatures along the food web.

Calliandra eriophylla (Pink Fairy Duster)

More water = more pollinators = more life

Fouquieria splendens (Ocotillo)

As the temperatures begin to climb and plants are in full bloom, we are approaching our busiest time for fieldwork here in the Mojave. We recently traveled to every common garden site (St. George, UT, Fort Irwin, CA, and Joshua Tree, CA) to monitor the survival of our transplants and get some baseline cover measurements. We were pleased to see that most of our plants are still alive, with many putting on new growth and some are even flowering! Soon we will start monitoring different traits to determine if the source population has any effect on plant success.

This past week we traveled back to Eureka Valley to start growth measurements for Swallenia alexandrae – Eureka Valley dune grass – and continue measuring Oenothera californica ssp. eurekensis – Eureka Valley Evening Primrose. It has only been two weeks since our previous monitoring trip, but some of the primrose had doubled in size and completely covered the tags we had marking them! They are loaded with flowers, and some have even started producing seed pods. Additionally, the Sphaeralcea ambigua and Baileya pleniradiata at the dunes are in full bloom, and created a beautiful sea of orange and yellow flowers that were visible from miles away. It’s amazing how much life these dunes can support! Walking through the dunes we saw desert iguanas darting from shrub to shrub, a horned lizard, a leopard lizard, and a yellow headed blackbird. The desert is truly starting to come to life.

Finally, my fellow interns and I have done some exploring around Las Vegas, and went to a restored wetland park for birdwatching and on a quest to find desert bighorn sheep. We saw several different species of water birds in the wetland, turtles, hummingbirds, and even a couple baby gallinules! There is a park in Boulder City that is well known for the bighorn sheep that come and graze there, and we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one just before the sun went down, and it returned to the mountains for the night. All in all, it has been a very busy but exciting two weeks and I’m looking forward to continuing the projects in the weeks to come.

Marble Canyon dunes in Eureka Valley, one of the three dunes where we study Oenothera califonica ssp. eurekensis and Swallenia alexandrae

Desert bighorn making his way back up to the mountains for the evening

Hi all!

I have been in Shoshone, ID for six days now and just finished up my first work week. The BLM office is full of wonderful people who have taken Avery (fellow CLM intern) and I out in the field to explore the Shoshone field office district.

A little blurb about Shoshone: Avery and I are living together in the oldest house in Shoshone, built in 1886! Mary L Gooding Park and the Little Wood River are right in our backyard (literally). There are about 1402 people who live here and an old school movie theatre. We are one hour away from the Sawtooth Mountains and Sun Valley (Awesome!).

We have been in the field identifying plants and getting to know our sage brush! It seems like this season we will be getting to do a lot of tasks including; vegetation monitoring, updating previous monitoring sites, herbarium organization, and seed collecting.

Today, we explored Craters of the Moon National Monument in search for sage grouse leks! It was a six AM start with binoculars and cameras to see this so called amazing process. Unfortunately, we did not see any leks but did flush about eight grouse!

I am looking forward to my season here in Shoshone, this place is a hidden gem in Idaho!
Alexi

Spring is here! The weather here in Boise has been great the last few weeks. Everything is in bloom and the weather has been great in the high 60’s and low 70’s. I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Before I know it though, it will be in the high 90’s and I will be waiting for it to cool down. Regardless, I am enjoying the spring weather at its best.

Now that my schedule has changed and I have gone to part time, it has taken me a little longer to complete the different projects.  I finished gathering information for the sagebrush project that entailed locating sagebrush lots that have been bought and sold, along with where they have been planted in the last 20 years. Once that was completed, I went back to going through all of the lots of seed in the warehouse and identifying what seed lots needed to be retested. Fortunately, of the hundreds of different lots in the warehouse, less than 30 issues were identified. Now that the Boise inventory is completed and up to date, I will begin focusing on the Ely warehouse these next few days in an attempt to finalize the inventory, update all of the seed lots, and identify test dates and current PLS. This task, however, will be more difficult for many different reasons, one of which is that fact that I am not down in Nevada at the warehouse. Considering the amount of time I have left with CLM, and the projects I have left to complete, time is definitely valuable. These next few weeks, I will be working diligently in my attempt to finish the workload in a timely manner. I am confident that I can finish what I have started in ample time. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Boise Regional Seed Warehouse

Bureau of Land Management

Hello Everyone!

I am now entering week three working with the BLM Hollister office in California and it has been an exciting and interesting time so far! Everyone is so welcoming and helpful out here and there is a lot of interesting research coming out of this office. It definitely helps working with such friendly people when transitioning to a new job and to a new home!

I am conducting all of my research at the beautiful Panoche Hills Recreation Area which is a semi-arid scrubland. This area is dominated by the shrub Ephedra californica and I have been working closely with a Ph.D. student testing plant-plant interactions between Ephedra and annuals as well as plant-animal interactions between Ephedra and kangaroo rats. Together we have set up a number of experiments including seed trapping experiments, herbivore exclosures to remove biotic stress, and kangaroo rat granivory trials. This year was an extremely dry year for California, so it is very interesting testing interactions in an abnormal year.

One thing that I would like to investigate further after the above mentioned experiments are complete is how the highly invasive grass species red brome has impacted the area. Specifically, there are two endangered species present at Panoche Hills, the giant kangaroo rat and the blunt nosed leopard lizard and I would like to know if/how the invasion by red brome has impacted their populations and potential ways to mitigate this impact.

I am looking forward to continuing this amazing experience!

Here are some photos of my adventures so far!

-Amanda

BLM Holister Field Office, California