This is blog number three, just finished my seventh week in Vale.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about conservation, its importance, and what it should look like in the face of climate change. I haven’t completely thought through all of these ideas, and am really just presenting a bunch of questions. Nor do I know how many people actually read this, but comments are appreciated.

The other week I went up to Washington to monitor a sensitive species that has only been found at this location. We spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of gas to get to the site every day that week. We also had to take a pretty dangerous road to and from the site each day, and were monitoring on some dangerously steep and slick hillsides. One we deemed too unsafe to complete the assessment. This all made me wonder just how worthwhile our efforts really were.

Is it really that important to monitor and conserve this particular species? While pondering this question I began to contemplate why conservation is important in general. This idea, the importance of conservation, or lack thereof, lies at the heart of what I’m doing here, at the heart of this program, and at the heart of my educational and career choices.

Conservation work does not always generate immediate success, results, or satisfaction. It tackles long-term problems and goals. This fact makes the work tough at times, but I’ve always told myself that the bigger picture, the long-term benefits of my work makes it all worth it. The knowledge that what I’m doing matters and is important has always been my fuel. But why does it matter? Why is conserving plant species important? Well, because each species is part of a complex ecosystem on which other organisms depend, on which other species depend, on which other ecosystems depend, on which we depend. Or maybe the answer is simply because other species are living things, and have their own right to continue to exist. These answers have generally sufficed my questioning mind. However, the more I think about the issue the less clear cut it becomes.

The natural world is always changing, always evolving. This is true even if our species hadn’t altered so many landscapes, or exacerbated global climate destabilization. I struggle with the idea of conserving something; a landscape, an ecosystem, or a species, in its natural state, since change is a constant and because the term “natural” is subjective. Species, landscapes, and ecosystems are evolving on geologic time scales. So who’s to say our definitions of “natural” and “native” are in fact natural and native? Is our own species not part of this “natural” environment? Taking these ideas into consideration, how beneficial is it truly to conserve a species in a location we’ve deemed “native”? On top of that, how beneficial, or important, or fruitful, are those efforts in the face of climate change? If the chance of long term survival is slim for the particular species we monitored in Washington, were our efforts a poor use of resources? What actions should scientists and conservationists be taking in the face of climate change? How do we decide which of those actions are most important, or the best use of our resources?

I’m not offering any answers here. Rather, I’m interested in what other people think about this topic. This is something I think about frequently, and don’t have great answers to, as few people I expect do. But they’re important ideas to discuss nonetheless. Please share your thoughts!

Colleen

Vale BLM

Washington site

Coming from southern Ohio where there is water in the air and ferocious foliage, this wide open and dry country is quite the contrast!  Although the drive was long, I was able to see the landscape change from the foothills of appalachia to the flat midwestern plains, then morph into the high desert and finally the mountains!  It is a beautiful time of year to take a good long drive.

Upon my arrival, I was faced with an exotic landscape and friendly faces.  My first week in the Lander Field Office consisted of a lot of introductions and some planning for my next couple of months of work.  Using USGS topography maps of the 2.2 million acre field office and University of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium, I was able to map out known populations of target species, then the fun really began!  The rest of my time was spent exploring the field office and getting aquatinted with the local flora.  At first it was kind of overwhelming…I felt like a stranger in a foreign land, but as I got my hands dirty things started to click.  I was able to vaguely recognize the western relatives of the eastern flora and brushed up on my keying-out skills.  Can you believe I forgot what papilionaceous was?!

The Lander Field Office is huge, covers a multitude of ecosystems, and has some amazing wildlife.  Just this week a rattle snake rattled at me, I stared down a mustang, and saw a golden eagle soaring through a canyon.  I have high hopes to see a moose.  My first two weeks have been eye opening and I’ve already learned a ton!  I think these next few months will be full of new experiences and jam packed with information and fond memories!

Until next time,

Emily Usher, Lander, Wyoming BLM

Once again, John Muir had said it best and I must give credit where credit is due (the title is part of a John Muir quote).

Week 7 of my 26 stint on the West coast has ended, and since my last post I now feel like a seasoned Californian. Aside from work related endeavors which I will get to momentarily, I have done some exploring in and outside of the Sierra’s. Camping in the high desert of the Eastern Sierra’s, evening hot spring dips near Mammoth Lakes, traversing through an abandoned boom town, roaming the Serengeti-like landscape of Bidwell Park, touring the brisk and diverse megalopolis of San Francisco, and much more. I have now realized in order to get a full grasp of California, 6 months time is not nearly enough.

Now to the good stuff, WORK! Being surrounded by the forest, plants and trees while in the field has not only left my body and soul feeling at its peak but allowed me to immerse myself in my studies.  Grad school will be a walk in the park compared to some of the hikes my partner and I have had to do to reach a known occurrence of a fire sensitive plant species. For the past month we’ve really focused on two main species (due to their phenologies): Mimulus filicaulis and pulchellus (Hetch Hetchy monkeyflower and Pansy monkeyflower) and Cypripedium montanum (Mountain Lady’s slipper). Though both the Mimulus populations seem to be rebounding well, it is another story with the Cypripedium. More often then not the occurrences which we are visiting have one individual or no individuals present, it’s quite the somber scene. Be that as it may, my colleague and I stumbled onto a population of more than 200 C. momtanum‘s in a 20×20 foot plot! Needless to say we were very excited. As a side note when I told that story to my roommates later that day (who are archaeologists), they found it entertaining how a person could get so excited over a plant.

Never forget how fortunate we are and, may fortune and knowledge smile upon you all,

Mi-Wuk Ranger Station

Forest Service

Jake

  Eastern side of the Sierra’s Abandoned boom town of Bodie, CA Golden Gate Bridge  80” DBH Douglas Fir

Taking lunch by the South Branch of the Tuolumne River

Massive stump hole

Cypripedium montanum

Hello. This week was particularly interesting and brought really a lot of new experience and knowledge even in comparison to the last couple months of being here. For the first time this year, and actually personally for me, we performed a fire rehabilitation monitoring survey in Alpine Co, CA – a procedure that takes about 7-9 hours of work for the team of 7 people. It is impressive – how much of accurate and precise data you acquire, and, in addition, it happens every year. For me it is a truly valuable and unforgettable experience, since the whole idea of fire rehabilitation monitoring is based on the precision of measurements, and I must say – we did our best in performing our tasks. With the feeling of responsibility (which was predominant in our attitude) everything was done with confidence and in high quality, regardless of hot weather and tons of prickly tumbleweed. In addition, the place where we were working and camping was beautiful and charming – completely different from the typical Great Basin sagebrush steppe. The Indian Creek Campground with dominant Pinus geffreyi and Pinus monophylla, plus water reservoir, is a great place to observe wildlife which is flourishing there. Probably, overall I could call this week as a super productive, with so far the biggest portion of new experiences and excitement (e.g. hunting Osprey), and, of course, completed work. Hope that our oncoming activities will be even more and more interesting, and based on what we’ve been doing I guess it’ll be so.

Farewell,

Andrii

Carson City, BLM

As more people join the botany survey crew here in Stanislaus forest our crews are filling out, leaders are getting organized, and we are getting ready to attack our surveys with full force! As the early season species we are surveying for disappear, we are starting to see a whole new wave of wildflowers. The last two weeks we have been seeing Clarkia species beginning to bloom, Eriophyllum nubigenum, and finding more Peltigera gowardii in streams.

The last two weeks have been dominated by mandatory trainings for the Forest Service as well as special trainings on soil profiling, habitat classification and orienteering. In the next week or two we will get more trainings on GIS and data analysis so we can begin to sort through the data we have been collecting.

Orobanche uniflora: hard to spot, but not uncommon

Eriophyllum nubigenum: Yosemite wooly sunflower

as the timber sales go through we will be seeing more logged slopes like this one here in the rim recovery area

Peltigera gowardii

-Emily Wells

Hello again fellow interns! Well it seems summer is in full swing. The temperature reached over 80 degrees this week in wonderful Kemmerer, Wyoming.  The temperature seems to be getting hot too quickly, but it’s nice not waking up to below freezing weather.  Work has been great; I have spent much of my time last week in an optional training.  The class was a week-long class located in Twin Falls, Idaho.  Class consisted of training on how to use the Seventeen Indicators of Range Health.  The training will be very valuable in my future career.  Much of the class was spent on soils, and how to identify specific ecological sites. Much of the information that was covered during training was review for me.  It was nice to have a refresher course. It amazes me how much a person can forget when they don’t use something that was learned in the past.

Being from Wyoming, I have not spent much time in Idaho.  The state goes from mountains in the east to a flatter grass/shrub community in the eastern part of the state.  The one thing that really surprised me was the huge amount of cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum).  I knew the invasive grass was a problem, but I didn’t realize it was a problem to this extent.  In fact, where I currently work, and have worked in the past, cheatgrass is a problem, but it is located in sporadic areas and does not cause a huge problem.  It was nice to learn how much the grass really creates a problem for native grass species. After leaving Idaho, and returning to Wyoming, I have a new profound appreciation of my work location.  I hope everyone has a great field season, and remember to stay safe!

Jeremy Sykes

Bureau of Land Management

Kemmerer, Wyoming

Two weeks ago Nathan, my co-intern, and I departed Denver in a mid-May snow storm which had socked in over the southern Rockies and turned mid- May into what seemed more like mid-winter. Such is the weather on the crest of the continent. We were headed to the western slope to run the Gunnison to complete cactus surveys. The Gunnison is one of the Colorado’s principle upper tributaries which drains the western aspects of the Continual divide as it runs through the Sawatch and San Juan mountains. Despite the snow rapidly accumulating outside my house in Denver the previous evening, I shoved board shorts, sandals, and the typical warm weather river gear into my dry bag feeling like I was packing more for a tropical get-away than for the wintery wet conditions outside.
The storm wore on the next day as we passed through South Park, down into the Arkansas River valley, and over the continental divide at Monarch Pass. Tomichi Creek and the town of Gunnison were encased in a wintery blanket of white. We continued westward into the evening passed Blue Mesa finally pausing at the rim of the Black Canyon to rest for the night. It was late and we needed to be up early, I hesitated before setting up my tent but finally conceded considering the conditions. It snowed late into the night accumulating lightly on the rain fly of my tent every so often cascading off in miniature avalanches. The temperature dipped low but I stayed warm insulated inside my goose down bag.

The following morning the snow had stopped but a heavy fog still shrouded the Black Canyon. As we drove off the rim toward Montrose the red rock country lay in the distance basking in the early morning sun; leaving us hopeful that the weather had finally taken a turn for the better. We met Brandee and Ken at the Uncompahgre Field Office in Montrose to assemble the gear and meet with river rangers Blaire, Ryan, and Rooster the head honcho. We were going on a cactus hunt.

The BLM on the western slope has been caught up in a debate over a small barrel cactus. Sclerocactus glaucus has consumed most of my time at the state office for the past several months. Earlier this year I conducted a literature review and compiled a status report for the species with the ultimate goal of getting a delisting package and petition drafted this coming winter. While the cactus most certainly has a limited range of distribution; being that it is endemic to several counties on Colorado’s western slope, it is certainly more abundant than USFWS believes it to be. I recently received an update to the Element Global Rank documented by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program estimating a total global metapopulation size of 25,000 individuals. Having been working with the cactus for the past three months it was clear that this was likely a low-ball estimate.

Unlike many other rare and endemic species S. glaucus doesn’t appear to be a specialist. In fact, within its confined range we’ve found it occupying a wide variety of habitat some of which is very intact and other areas which would be considered marginal by the most generous assessment. We’ve found it occupying sites with highly developed cryptogrammic soils, on selenium shale badlands, areas of hardscrabble as hard packed and scabby as concrete, and in areas nuked by grazing where you literally have to peel back the cheat grass to find the plants. In general though, S. glaucus doesn’t venture very far from the alluvial river terraces of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers in the upper reaches of their basins. A broad swath of potential habitat exists in a rather remote region which spans the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area and the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness and is only reasonably accessible by floating the river.

As we drove to the put-in north of Delta, low clouds and a fresh layer of snow clung to the broad flanks of the Grand Mesa, but by the time we shove off mid-morning the temperature had climbed into the mid-sixties with cobalt blue skies and a slight breeze and only promised to improve. The weather in the high desert canyons of the western slope is capricious by nature. During the short spring season you could experience a variety of weather ranging from rain and snow to temperatures in the upper eighties. The river was cappuccino muddy and running reasonably high at 3,500cfs. Rooster informed me that with the monumental snowpack still clinging to the divide and the coming warm temperatures that in a few week’s time the river would be ripping at at least twice its current volume. The stretch we were running though was fairly tame and lazy so it wasn’t difficult to sit back, relax, and watch the canyons unfold around each meander.
We were targeting areas on the rivers west bank which is encompassed by the wilderness area; the goal being if we can locate significant populations which are already within a protected area that our pitch for delisting will be strengthened. Despite having nine people and the better part of three days the amount of potential habitat flanking river left was remarkable, stretching nearly the entire 26 miles between Escalante Canyon and our take out a Whitewater just before Grand Junction. We focus on areas surrounding establish river-rat campsites fanning out along alluvial slopes and ledges. It isn’t long before were into the cactus. We assess areas quickly, pin flagging individuals to keep a running count, mapping polygons, and moving on downriver – a process we keep up for three days. The river rangers aren’t the only ones astounded by the amount of cactus we were finding. You could barely walk a few feet in any direction without bumping into it clustered cactus bunches crouching squat in the grass and shrubbery. On one afternoon we effectively counted close to 2,000 individuals in a five acre area.

By the time we reached the take-out at Whitewater we were nearly cactus’d out and feeling pretty good about ourselves. After three days of surveys in only a portion of the potential habitat which flanks the river through the canyons, we successfully located 6,000 previously undocumented individual cacti, or nearly 20% of the previously believed global population. With another few tours in the boats it is very conceivable we could locate an additional 25,000 individuals. It remains to be seen what the fate of the cactus will be. But for now it feels good to know that hard work and persistence pays off.
Until next time from the Front Range,

Phil Krening
Colorado State Office – BLM
Lakewood, CO

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Dominguez – Escalante National Conservation Area

Entrada sandstone and the muddy Gunni

Pyramid Rock ACEC

S. glaucus

The last few weeks have been busy.  To recap, we’re building floating u-shaped docks from which we are going to suspend nets that form a sort of cage.  We’re then going to catch some larval shortnose suckers and place them in the cages where they’ll live (hopefully) all season, then at the end of the season we’ll tag and release them.

Weir used by USGS to monitor sucker populations.

We’re still in the planning stages at this point, and are working hard to avoid missing our window to collect fish.  Despite a lot of delayed orders at the hardware stores, we have our docks and cages mostly ready to be stocked with fish.  We’re going to start setting plankton tow nets during the nights in order to collect larvae to put in the cages, and then the, “official” propagation work can begin.

Nature Conservancy site.

We still have some work to do with the docks, but it’s good to have them in the water and basically set up after dealing with them for the past few weeks.  We’re using JetDocks floating dock systems and they are just not nearly as easy to assemble and work with as their YouTube videos would have you believe!  Anyways, at this point we’re just working on setting up some aerators (for when the dissolved oxygen gets too low in the cages), and DataSondes (to tell us when the DO is too low, as well as to monitor ammonium levels,  pH, conductivity, and water temperature).  We also need to put some bird netting across the pens to keep our feathered friends (of which there are many) from helping themselves to our fish.

Planting day with the restoration team.

I’ve also been able to help out on a planting day with some restoration folks from our office.  The fish morphometrics project is also progressing.  We’ve also been getting a lot of help, both in terms of people-power and equipment, from the other agencies in the area, especially USGS and BOR.  It’s really cool to see how everyone helps each other out and works together on these projects.  So with some help and hard work, hopefully I’ll have some fish to talk about next time!