Hello again my fellow CLM interns and CLM blog readers!  My internship is now well-over halfway through, bringing both excitement to move on to new places and new things and slight dread regarding moving away from the friendships I’ve made and fun I’ve had in Boise.  I think that my last 2 posts efficiently covered the seed collections and habitat assessments that we have been doing over the past 3 months, so I shall instead write about other things we have had the opportunity to experience/help out with.

Given Boise, Idaho’s 5 hour proximity to Bend, Oregon, we were able to personally deliver our last batch of seeds to the Bend Seed Extractory.  The assistant manager there,  Sarah, was kind enough to give us a tour of the facility and even demonstrate some of the equipment used for seed cleaning and separation.  It amazes me how few people work at the extractory, given the quantities of seed they must process.  Many of the collections they receive are somewhat new to them, so they must use the process of trial and error to determine the best combination of equipment and settings to extract, separate, and clean the seeds.  The top photo is of an anti-gravity machine that pumps air up from the bottom like an air hockey table to elevate the seeds and then shakes back and forth at a slight angle to separate heavier and lighter materials.  The seeds are slowly pushed off the end of the table, and the adjustable wooden wedges are used to direct the different weight classes into different bins.  Pretty cool!

Anti-Gravity Seed Separation Machine

Gradient of pure seeds at the top and unwanted material at the bottom

Samples of seed collections from our field office last summer

Another day was spent accompanying some BLM employees from the Washington D.C. office and Idaho State office on a tour of the Intermountain Bird Observatory/Research Station.  We helped the researchers check their mist nets for songbirds every 30 minutes during their 5 hours after sunrise shift.  The birds are all identified, tagged if they aren’t already, measured, aged, and inspected for parasites and overall health.  Everything is then recorded, and the birds are set free to go about their daily activities.

Colorful individual ready for release

Too content to fly away

One of the many mist nets in the area

Thanks for reading!

Dan King

BLM – Four Rivers Field Office – Boise, ID

As the month of August began, the heat set in and the fires ignited! This past month has been both busy and enjoyable for me, with many more memories to add to my BLM-Buffalo experience. I would say that the bulk of this month has been spent seed collecting for me personally. I have collected and shipped a total of 9 populations with 5 more on the way! To be honest, I would have liked to have collected a few more populations by this time of year, but the weather continues to be unpredictable and sometimes uncooperative, which has definitely been a learning experience in being flexible and compromising. One of my favorite collections I did though was of Achillea millefolium, or Western Yarrow. By chance, I had found this (huge!!) population of yarrow on a small patch of BLM just within the property of a very friendly rancher. Better yet, this rancher has a herd of awesome goats that he is using to help curtail another unwanted plant species on his property. So of course, coming out to monitor the yarrow and then collect it, we were always welcomed by the goats that would come to the truck looking for some pets, hugs and food 😛

Saying hello to our goat friends at my collection site for Achillea millefolium!

Another seed collection site that I have been enjoying this past month is called Outlaw Cave, on the southern end of my office’s boundaries. This area is both beautiful and historically interesting, as it is the known as one of the hiding places of famous Wild West outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It is quite a picturesque drive to get to this area, as you drive along the “Red Wall” of Wyoming and among many beautiful horse and cattle ranches. I have three seed populations in this area that are just starting to ripen late in the season for collection. Unfortunately, with all of the fires that have been raging in the West as of late, the views have been rather hazy and the air smoky, even though there are no serious fires in this immediate area. This has made collecting a little more challenging, as the air is extremely dry and hot, making hydration crucial for the long days in the field. Even so, it is still an breath-taking site to collect at, and I am thankful to have the opportunity to work within such awesome, rugged scenery!

Outlaw Cave- the most beautiful part of the office’s BLM land!

Jade, the horse whisperer, at Red Wall.

In other news, it appears that collection season is slowly winding down. I can’t believe that within just two weeks it will be September and fall and cooler weather will start setting in. I expect that my work will begin transferring to more office work as I begin mapping my population sites on GIS, inputting collection data onto the computer and preparing my voucher specimens. This internship has certainly flown by quickly, and I am anxious to figure out my next steps and plans for the months ahead!

-Katie

This marks the end of my internship with USGS Henderson in the Mojave Desert. It has been a fantastic experience, and I have learned so much! It has been a pleasure to work with amazing researchers and contribute to fascinating and relevant research! Working on a study related to Desert Tortoise, Gopherus Agassizii, has been very eye-opening. Before this internship, I had not worked with an endangered species, and I was fascinated to learn more about the regulations and legislation in place to protect endangered species!

Most significantly, I have learned an entirely new flora, informed by the Jepson Manual, as well as my mentors and other botanists in the area. From Phacelia to Cryptantha and Sphaeralcea to Oenothera, I have expanded my botanical knowledge considerably! It was a great experience to use a new flora (the Jepson Manual) and to think about different ways to identify plants (i.e. examining at Cryptantha “nutlets” for species identification, using bracts for Ephedra ID, etc.). I enjoyed exploring and discovering small portions of the Mojave, and the experience has inspired me to explore the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts as well.

In addition to plant identification, I learned some new techniques for data analysis. I learned that R is an extremely powerful analysis tool, if you know how to use it! I took some time to read up on R code and packages, which was very helpful. While I didn’t end up using it for this internship, I certainly plan to use it in the future!

After performing some preliminary analyses on our juvenile Desert Tortoise vegetation survey, I began to consider some important concepts. For example, species are often clumped by “native” vs “nonnative” species. However, these categories, while useful in certain circumstances, can be misleading. For example, with regard to nutrition, studies have shown some nonnative species to be detrimental to tortoise health and others to be beneficial. Bromus rubens has been shown to be of poor nutritional quality for tortoises, while Erodium cicutarium is actually quite nutritious, especially for juvenile tortoises. While these are both incredibly abundant nonnative species, they offer completely opposite nutritional characteristics. Discoveries such as these demand a more comprehensive set of questions than simply: “how do native vs. nonnative plants compare in terms of nutrition?” Instead, one must take into account various factors, including origin, abundance, caloric value, mineral concentrations, etc. These questions help drive truly innovative studies.

I also gained more GIS experience throughout my internship. I had the opportunity to explore the multitude of functions provided by ArcMap to accomplish tasks such as map ping our vegetation sampling effort and selecting candidate sites for our oil well vegetation project. Incidentally, I have also learned more about oil well production on the Colorado Plateau than I ever expected to know!!  Here’s a photo of a mesa nearby our field sites.

My internship exceeded my expectations, and I am very happy to have had the experience. I hope to work in this area again in the future! I am sad to leave the Mojave, but I’m sure I will be back again.

Thanks to everyone who played a role in my internship experience, particularly my mentors!

Cheers!
Daniel

Today is my last day working on the Stanislaus. I have gotten used to living my life in pine forest and will miss it. After growing up in the darker fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, the smell of the sun on the ponderosa and jeffery bark is delightful!

In just over two weeks I will be moving from a vacation town of several hundred folks (Long Barn, CA) to a major metropolitan city (Madrid, Spain). I doubt my fellow Fulbright scholars will understand what it is like to drive a field vehicle two hours into a burned area on washed out roads, clearing fallen saplings out of the roadway all the while, in order to hike steep slopes and end up covered in charcoal. And I very much doubt they will understand how much fun it is! Who knows, there will be another ecologist among them…

Throughout the season I have had the opportunity to participate in various projects. I began monitoring populations of several sensitive species post Rim Fire (2013), moved on to protecting sensitive orchids on rangeland, and, after acting as the botanist for several wetland delineations in restoration sites, I spent several months surveyed reforestation units for sensitive Clarkia and noxious weeds. While my past experience has been mostly data collection with an academic purpose, this summer has been steeped in application. It has at once been grounding (to put theory into practice), and a little tedious (to cover such a large burned area with our survey crew).

However, each project offered its own opportunity for learning. In the surveys for weeds and sensitive species I learned GIS (from scratch!!), and became very adept at mapping populations in rough terrain. We made countless maps, outlined each population we encountered, and updated data from previous years. During the wetland delineations I learned to determine the boundary within a gradient of plant communities, and how to interpret the wetland status of different species. Working with an Americorps crew to construct cages in order to protect the mountain lady slipper orchid I considered my position on conservation/restoration. Questions like: How can we be the most effective in protecting large, complex, systems? What is the value of a man-made ecosystem? A “traditional”, “untouched” ecosystem? A “novel” ecosystem including invasives? Honestly, I’m still looking for answers to those questions, and I think that this momentum will lead me to my next opportunity.

Alright, that’s all for now. A warm farewell to all and a hearty thanks to Krissa and Rebecca for making this program possible.

Cheers,

Emily

Clarkia australis

Lush Claytonia after the burn

A brushy drainage greening up after fire

Summer is drawing to a close here in NorCal but I’m happy to report that I’ve received an extension and will be in Arcata until October. As much as I’ve explored over the past 5 months, there is still so much more to see! Not to mention learn!

Summer in California is synonymous with wildfire and this year has been no exception. As I write this, over 60 fires are raging across the state, thousands of acres have burned, hundreds of miles of dozer line has been cut into the wilderness, and millions of seeds will soon be needed for rehabilitation. Californian wilderness is highly fire adapted with many species thriving in the space created after a blaze, however too many fires in too short of a time period can cause biodiversity loss and dramatically increase the susceptibility of the habitat to invasion from non-native plant species. The time immediately following a fire can therefore be a critical window to perform rehabilitation with native species, and the National Seed Strategy for rehabilitation and restoration, launched by the BLM this week, aims to address this specifically by having the right seed available when necessary so it can be on the ground as soon as possible.

I have spend the last month out and about for SOS, collecting the seed from native species that may be used in these future rehabilitation projects. I can’t begin to tell you how much satisfaction this has brought me, knowing that I am directly contributing to better rehabilitation. It was also an incredible “from the ground up” learning experience for me, watching the phenology of a plant from start to finish, learning the morphology at each stage, and waiting for that perfect moment to pluck the fruit from the plant.