Final Reflections

Posted on 28 July, 2014 by rking00

I recently finished my internship with the USGS in the Mojave Desert. My final weeks were spent doing fieldwork at the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley National Park, and wrapping up data entry and analyzing the data we (my fellow interns and I) collected throughout our internship. As we tried to piece together our results into a coherent narrative of the workings of desert restoration, I frequently thought about my experience there and what I would take away from my time in the southwest.

In our internship, we worked on several projects all geared toward understanding the effect of restoration techniques in the Mojave Desert, often for desert tortoise habitat. Because we worked in several areas across four states, we were exposed to the extremes of the Mojave and the challenges to restoration in different areas. I learned about post-fire restoration techniques and monitored their effectiveness, examined the effects of fire on habitat suitability for desert tortoises, and studied the effect of source material on successful plant restoration. Throughout all of this fieldwork, I gained experience using dichotomous keys for plant ID, learned several sampling methods, and learned about the intricacies of a delicate ecosystem – all things I hoped I would learn at the beginning of my internship.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to work in a unique and beautiful part of the Mojave that is the Eureka Valley in Death Valley National Park. It takes over two hours to reach once you are inside the park, driving on dirt roads over mountain passes. I went there three times for a week each to monitor populations of two endemic, endangered plants on three different dune systems. I can honestly say I’m not sure I ever would have seen this valley if it wasn’t for this internship, which would have been a shame because it is a fascinating and beautiful place.

While I am sad to leave the Mojave behind, I am grateful for all I’ve learned throughout this internship and the friends and mentors I became connected with through this program. It’s been a blast, but now it’s on to the next adventure – grad school!

A beautiful sunset in Death Valley marks the end of my internship

Cheers,

Rachel

USGS, Las Vegas Field Office

The Heats Winding Up As I Wind Down

Posted on 28 July, 2014 by jlwils10

Things have been nothing short of interesting here in the Rogue Valley. The heat has been on as temperatures have been reaching averages of 104 degrees regularly. We got a bit of relief last week as some cloud cover, rain, and storms moved in, but this has only lead to the birth of numerous lightning fires throughout the state. Luckily most of the fires have been to the East of the Cascades so far and we have not experienced much air pollution from the smoke of nearby fires.

As a result of the weather, and the fact that pretty much everything on the valley floor has gone to seed and dried out, we have moved our scouting for plants into the higher elevations of the nearby mountains. Between 2,000 and 5,000 feet elevation, plants are now either still flowering or going to seed. Scouting the mountains has reignited an appreciation for the geology of this region. At the south end of the Rogue Valley the Klamath-Siskiyous and the Cascades encompass the valley like a large bowl. This leads to a wide variety of habitat niches. Some of the mountains nearby are plutons, large rocky bubbles, essentially. Some mountains are volcanic, others the result of the North American tectonic plate shifting over the Juan de Fuca plate. Most of the mountains nearby are basaltic while others toward the Illinois River valley are mostly serpentinite and yield diverse plant communities all their own including many local endemics.

We have now reached approximately 50 collections, so we are merely 10 collections away from our initial target of 60 collections, which we are sure to exceed. So far we have vouchered approximately 130 botanical specimens. As the season starts to enter its final leg, it seems like we have made good progress and I am satisfied with our results.

This all comes in good time as my Environmental Education graduate program at Southern Oregon University starts back up. I am now in a transition period between switching from the seed collecting world to the outdoor education world as I have to reduce my work time in exchange for taking classes and planning lessons in preparation for our Fall in the Field residential and day programs in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Ashland, OR and the Deer Creek Center in Selma, OR. I have a little over a month to go with the BLM/SOS and I can say that I am pleased with my experience in this program thus far and will look back fondly on this internship. It looks like we will have accomplished what we set out to accomplish and got to explore Oregon’s many wonderful outdoor areas in the process. I suppose I can’t ask for much more than that.

– Jason

Eastern Oregon

Posted on 28 July, 2014 by arice

Hey!

With fire season in full swing here in Eastern Oregon, the office has been pretty busy this past month. Fortunately, these fires have provided me the oportunity to conduct spatial analyses on what kinds of lands and structures have burned so a rehabilitation plan can be put into place. This involves looking at former restoration plans and determining what the botanists, engineers, etc will need analyzed. Then, I create models using ArcGIS model builder so I can can save the proccesses to be used on a future fire if need be.

In addition to fire analysis, I have been working on creating maps for an Oregon Trail tour an archaeologist in the office is leading. These maps would be for the public going on the tour so they can find their way and also just as an overview of the route. This project has been a test of my cartography skills as I have had to try to find a way to fit a lot of information into an 11×17 map.

In all, these past few weeks have been great and I’m excited to continue my work here!

Vale, OR

Bureaucracy and butterfly plant

Posted on 28 July, 2014 by lleather

Howdy from Cheyenne, Wyoming! Requisite cowboy-speak; it is, after all, Frontier Days in Cheyenne this week, and everyone and everything is rodeo- and country-music-crazy. Over one million tourists come through over the course of nine days, and I can hear the nightly concerts (Florida Georgia Line, Brad Paisley, and Tim McGraw, to name a few) from my house, two miles from the arena.

But outside Frontier Days, my position here is based around revising Bureau of Land Management (BLM) documents that assess the effects of government action on threatened and endangered (T & E) species and establish conservation measures to protect them. The documents, called programmatic biological assessments (BAs), exist for every species occurring in Wyoming that is listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). BAs can be more than 50 pages long, could cover just one field office in the state or all ten of them, can go years without being updated, and rely mostly on intergovernmental communication and consultation, rather than published scientific literature. So, revising them is a pretty big job. I spent a while wading through the bureaucracy and maze of documents and policies that pertain to the species I’m working on, trying to acquaint myself with a world and a set of language that are very different from the academic research I’m familiar with. The profusion of acronyms, which you might already have noticed, doesn’t make things any easier– knowing an NSO from an HMA from an ACEC from a DPC (and so on and so forth) is critical in working on these documents. But I’m getting the hang of it, asking questions, and figuring out how this system works. Hopefully soon you’ll see updated programmatic biological assessments for Yermo xanthocephalus (desert yellowhead), Spiranthes diluvialis (Ute ladies’-tresses), and Gaura neomexicana ssp. coloradensis (Colorado butterfly plant).

Threatened and Endangered plants of Wyoming poster, in my cubicle for inspiration. And because plants are pretty.

But thankfully I haven’t spent all of my time poring over government documents. Over the last few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to help out with surveys for that last species, Colorado butterfly plant. Butterfly plant is a threatened species that occurs in riparian areas, and in Wyoming, only occurs near Cheyenne. The Fish and Wildlife Service has been conducting the surveys. A survey basically consists of driving out to a known butterfly plant habitat in the morning, walking with the other surveyors–from one to five people total–in a line to extend horizontally from the side of a creek through suitable habitat for the plant, and calling out how many plants we find as we walk along the creek while someone takes GPS points. Some surveys, each of us have only seen a few plants: maybe one or two at a time, and spaced far apart. But on other surveys, there have been too many to count: we’ve had to just make estimates of the number of plants in a huge cluster. And at one survey location, we saw a mutated specimen of the plant with a much wider stem– think rhubarb instead of a daisy– and an enormous inflorescence with dozens of flowers at the tip, instead of just a few.

normal, non-mutated butterfly plant

mutant butterfly plant

And we’ve found some other fun critters on the surveys, too. One of the surveyors nearly stepped on a snipe nest (Gallinago sp.), and on another morning, after seeing several areas where antelope had bedded down in the tall grass, another surveyor startled a fawn who jumped out from just a few feet in front of her and bounded in the opposite direction.

snipe eggs

I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to do a mix of field work and office work in my position– it makes you appreciate both aspects of the job so much more. I look forward to spending more time in the field on visits to a few of the field offices in the coming months, and I’m excited to continue to learn more about these endangered plant species and the work we can do to protect them.

Here’s a Frontier Days rodeo picture for the road. Cheers from Cheyenne!

Bull riding at Cheyenne Frontier Days. They played "You Shook Me All Night Long" while this section started; also note that the bull is airborne here.

Bull riding at Cheyenne Frontier Days. They played “You Shook Me All Night Long” while the event started. Also note that the bull is airborne.

Summer at Provo shrub science lab

Posted on 28 July, 2014 by hectoroc

Hello, I hope you all are having a fun time this summer. As in my previous post, I am going to talk about our research and my experience at the Provo shrub science lab. Our e-nose research is going well, especially during the summer days. The reason is because we are finding better smell profiles results and a good differentiation between sagebrush subspecies with the hot weather. Additionally, at this time we are combining chromatographic techniques with our e-nose experiments which seems very promising to complement the identification of smells and chemical profiles of subspecies, and the differentiation between them. I talked in my last post about the plan to present at the SER conference in Redmond Oregon, well, I am finally registered. But we have not just done science in the laboratory this past month, we also starting cleaning some of the sagebrush experiments at Ephraim, Utah. I have to say that my mentor gave me a good lesson on how important it is to just take a break from the lab sometimes, and take a shovel and remove some weeds.

Like in my previous posts, I want to say thank you to my mentor, to all my companions and the CLM staff for all the support, and the CLM program for this great opportunity. There is always something to do at the Provo shrub science lab and I feel lucky to work in this incredible place, with such incredible people.