Greetings again from North Carolina!  The past couple weeks have been full of adventure for our Seeds of Success East crew.  We got to try something new and collect seeds from a boat at the National Park Service’s Dyke Marsh Preserve outside of Washington D.C.  As a large chunk of our target species are semi-aquatic, we have been longing to use a boat for collections for most of the season.  We finally got our chance, and even had a captain to chauffeur us around in a motorboat.  We worked with National Park Service staff to collect Fraxinus profunda, or pumpkin ash.  The seeds of the ash will be banked in order to provide a genetic repository and a means of replanting after the devastating ash borer insect moves on out of the area.  Brent Steury, a Natural Resources Program Manager from the Park Service who we worked with on this project, filled us in on the threat.  The bugs seem to be just beginning to move into the area, but due to their exotic origins, the trees have little to no defense against them and almost 100% mortality is expected as they begin to prey on area ash populations.  The future looks grim for these trees, but it was gratifying to know that we are working well ahead to ensure that the genetics will not be lost.

The crew wading around outside our collection boat at Dyke Marsh

During a quiet moment before the rain hit, we collected Polygonum arifolium in the surreal beauty of this baldcypress swamp at Pettigrew State Park in NC.

The week after that, we had to face the threat of Hurricane Joaquin!  Most of the state of North Carolina was already expecting heavy rains for the few days that Joaquin was cooking up in the Atlantic to our southeast.  As my collection partner and I prepared to head to the Outer Banks, we packed extra rain gear and continuously monitored the coastal weather to make sure we weren’t driving into a dangerous situation.  As it was, we got lucky and didn’t work in anything worse than a light drizzle.  We drove north to Currituck Banks, to check on the maturity of the Sea Oats (Uniola paniculata) that we are planning to collect in that area.  We were greeted by a tumultuous sea and high winds.  We stayed only long enough to take a peek at the Uniola and see that where there is normally a wide, flat, beach that 4×4 trucks use as a road, there were only angry gray waves breaking just below the primary dunes.  We had only spent one day at the Outer Banks when rain, high tides, and wind-driven currents started to flood the roads.  We quickly decided to get off the barrier islands before anything could happen that would leave us stranded out there on what is basically a very thin strip of sand off the mainland.

Winds whip a “No Swimming” flag as the ocean becomes tumultuous ahead of Joaquin’s arrival.

We kept watching Joaquin, not sure yet if he would hit the coast or veer east out to sea.  We headed north to Virginia and got a head start on the storm.  While we were there, the rain subsided a bit, but again, high winds, heavy rains in the area, and higher-than-normal tides were causing minor flooding all over the place.  We had to cancel visits to all of our National Wildlife Refuge sites, as they closed due to flooding.  We went to a few more sites during the week, but high water made some of our potential collections impossible.  In the end, we headed back to Chapel Hill early and spent more time than normal working on species research and keying out some unknowns.  It was actually great to spend the time identifying some of the unknown plants we have been encountering.  Now we know more of the species that we are looking for in our seed scavenger hunt.

Next week, the weather is supposed to be clear and I’m sure we will be very busy collecting everything that we didn’t get to last time around.  I hope everyone else is staying safe as the weather becomes a bit more tumultuous this month.  Until next time, peace outside!

Emily Driskill

SOS East: North Carolina Botanical Garden

Greetings from the Ridgecrest Field Office! Over the last few weeks the temperatures here in the Mojave have become more “reasonable” by my standards, and today it is even chilly and raining! Seems like we’ll get two days of “fall” weather before it’s back in the 80s and 90s. So that’s been nice. What else has happened around here? Many things! We’ve made several seed collections over the last few weeks, but that activity (as you can guess) certainly is waning. Our field office now has a wildlife biologist, and I’m quite excited for the opportunity to work with and learn from her.

Recently I was able to visit a wind farm with the biologist, along with BLM employees from another field office and some folks from the Fish and Wildlife Service. The purpose of the visit was to examine the wind farm’s proposed system for California Condor detection and emergency turbine shutdowns. It was very interesting to see the collaboration between the company and agencies.

It turns out, if you look close enough, plants really do have hearts. These are some leaves from an Atriplex species from which we recently collected seed at Olancha Dunes.

The week before last, I attended my alternate training opportunity, which was Fire Ecology of the Sierra Nevada put on by the Jepson Herbarium. It was a 3-day workshop at Yosemite National Park, and it was fantastic. I went up a couple days early to camp, hike, and explore the park as well–which was fortunate timing because one week later, the high elevations are now covered in snow and Tioga Pass closed.

Our workshop was led by several grad students from UC Berkeley, each with research pertaining to different aspects of fire ecology. The first day was about historical fire in the area, changes in policies over the decades, and the effects of fire suppression. The second day consisted of talking about fire regimes and field visits to places where the fire regime has been restored, to look at the forest structure/vegetation communities found there. We also heard about pollinator responses to fire, which was interesting. An aha moment from that day: thinking of “rare” plants/wildflowers, how many of those are really just early successional species that we rarely see because of fire suppression? And when an area finally burns, in some areas the fuel load is so high that the severity of the fire kills the seed bank.

Our final day was spent with one specific case study: the Rim Fire from 2013. We heard from Kelly (with BLM Fire) and June (a fire archaeologist). They were incredibly interesting to talk to. Kelly led us through Tuolomne Grove (where I got to see my first giant sequoia!!!) and talked us through their strategy for preventing the Rim Fire from ripping through the area–which was a combination of having treated the area previously with prescribed burns so that recurring burns were mostly of low severity, protecting the giant sequoias through duff removal and wetting, and backburning starting at the grove and letting it continue onwards to meet the head fire. June told us what it was like being a resource advisor on fires, the processes and considerations that go into planning strategies when fighting fires or deciding to allow them to burn. Ultimately the Rim Fire burned ~250,000 acres of land in Yosemite NP and Stanislaus NF, and the areas of high severity burn were very substantial. Here, we are at a site in Stanislaus talking about how landscape, weather, and fuel load affect fire severity, the difference between low/moderate/high severity burns and what that means for stand replacement, as well as post-fire salvage logging.

I had the opportunity to volunteer for the BLM in the Great American Outdoors exhibit at the LA County fair. Most of the day, we worked at the game table where people had to answer trivia questions to win prizes. I got to hold a rosy boa as we were sitting on the float waiting for the parade to start; and we got to ride with Mohave Maxine, Woodsy Owl, Smokey the Bear, and Seymour Antelope. It was a really fun day.

During a field visit last week, I saw my first Mojave rattlesnake. Unfortunately, he was quite crispy.

After just over two months, I am still seeing new things almost every time we go out into the field. Last week we went to collect information for an EA that is being written. We went out to Robber’s Roost (pictured here) to see if cattle access to a state threatened plant would be reduced by the proposed fenceline.

 And something I was personally excited for: I finished creating the digital record of the RIFO Herbarium. I think this was the prettiest sheet I saw.