The last few weeks have been full of many endings and culminations for us here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. We had our final week out in the field, visited the coasts of Maryland and Virginia, and got to see some amazing landscapes. Though it was cloudy and threatening to rain, both of our final sites, Blackwater NWR and Chincoteague NWR, proved to be beautiful:

Our paths through a field of Spartina patens and Distichlis spicata at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.

Wild ponies munching away in the marsh at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

Our visit to Chincoteague NWR culminated in an awesome show by the wild ponies there too! While collecting Smilax rotundifolia, we got an up-close-and-personal encounter with a group of wild ponies that came to get a drink of freshwater at a vernal pool next to the Smilax briers. Check out a video that we took of these guys: Wild Ponies!

We also got lucky enough to make a collection of Aristida tuberculosa, seaside threeawn, at Chincoteague…our first collection of it this season! It’s got absolutely beautiful seeds:

Aristida tuberculosa seed

Aristida tuberculosa plants

On another note, my 5-year-old hiking boots finally bit the dust. These boots have roamed many a landscape and have helped me perform tons of field work over the last 5 years. I first wore them as a Student Conservation Association high school crew member working in the Chicago forest preserves. It is quite a good ending for them to have died while working as a CLM intern. I can truly say that they have been well worn!

The sad soles of my 5-year-old hiking boots. They got a lot of use this summer on the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland!

Sadly, my minivan also recently broke down. However, during the course of this internship, she got to take me and my fellow interns on many trips to the North Carolina outer banks!

My 1996 minivan getting towed away this past week. It lived a long life and got to see lots of amazing landscapes this summer!

Today and tomorrow are our final days in the office. We’re finishing up the cleaning of our last seed collections and shipping them to the Cape May Plant Materials Center. This morning, we’re hanging out in a back office in the NCBG Totten Center, while the Horticulture Program has a meeting. It feels like kindergarten again: hanging out on carpeted floors playing with pine cones!

This internship has been an amazing experience for me. I moved to North Carolina about a year ago, and thanks to this internship, I really feel like it has become my home. I now know so much about southeastern flora and have gotten to explore both the Piedmont and North Carolina coast. At the beginning of the summer, I was most familiar with invasive plants and native prairie plants of the Midwest (I’m from Chicago, IL originally). Today, I know about 100 species of native southeastern grasses, trees, and flowers, and I’m still learning more every day! I feel proud to say that we made 234 seed collections this season, all of which will be used to restore coastal environments through projects for the Hurricane Sandy Mitigation Fund. Thanks, CLM Internship, for this amazing experience!

All the best,

Maggie Heraty

North Carolina Botanical Garden

CLM Intern 2015

Today is the last day of my internship at the Lander Field Office. The last 7 months have gone by way too fast. I will definitely miss Wyoming and the LFO, but I am also excited to be home with my family for thanksgiving. This last month has gone by in a blur, but we have accomplished quite a bit.

Early this month we finished up our last seed collection. We collected winterfat (Krascheninnikovia lanata) and finally got enough seed to become a collection. The winterfat seed took a very long time to ripen, so we had to go and collect on three separate occasions.

Winterfat, a fluffy shrub. The seeds are furry!

Our Winterfat collection site near the Owl Creek Mountains

This month we worked on editing our Seeds of Success data in ArcMap. I took a class on ArcGIS in college, so this was a good refresher for me. The data editing took a lot longer than we anticipated, but it was very satisfying when we were done. We packaged up all of our seed and sent it off to the Bend, Oregon seed cleaning facility. In total we had 14 collections, which was over our target goal of 10 collections for this season. 10,000 seeds from each collection will stay in a seed holding facility until it is requested for reclamation efforts. Any extra seed will be sent to the Meeker facility in Colorado for evaluation trials. We also created herbarium vouchers for many of the plants we found this season. Herbarium vouchers for our SOS collections were sent to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC to be part of their permanent collection, and were also sent to the Rocky Mountain Herbarium in Laramie. Other plants we vouchered ended up in the LFO’s personal herbarium.

Emma and I packaging up our seed collections to send to Bend.

This month we also did more horse monitoring in the Green Mountain HMA. There are a huge number of horse in this HMA, and it is easy to find them. I think horse monitoring has definitely been my favorite project this season. Wild horses are incredibly beautiful to observe in their natural habitat. I really enjoyed watching their behavior and how they interacted with one another. The last couple weeks of horse monitoring there was snow, which made everything seem more beautiful.

Horses in the Green Mountain HMA

Field work in the snow!

Horse monitoring at Green Mountain

This month we also did one last round of riparian area monitoring. The cows are all out of the pastures we monitor, but riparian area monitoring still needs to be done to see how the horses and antelope affect the riparian areas. Most of the areas we monitored were very short, which may mean the cows will get a limited grazing season next year.

Riparian area monitoring at Sulphur Bar Spring.

Overall, this internship with the BLM and Chicago Botanic Garden has been wonderful. Many of the employees here went out of their way to make sure we got to work on a variety of projects. I really enjoyed being able to work on so many different things. Over the season we worked on seed collecting, vouchering plants, horse monitoring, plant monitoring, riparian area monitoring, sage grouse collaring, aspen stand delineation, compliance monitoring, fence projects, reclamation projects, and creating literature for the public. I learned many new skills that I believe will be helpful to me in the future. This internship was an experience that I will never forget and that I am so thankful for. I feel very lucky to have been able to work and live in such a beautiful place. Until next time, Wyoming. I will definitely come back and visit.

Erin, Lander Field Office, BLM- Wyoming

The Wind River Mountains

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with aliteration.  Or searching.  Or Seattle to be honest.  I just wanted to quickly share my anguish coming up with titles before I get into the meat of my blogpost

I spent most of this summer working on SOS. The San Juan Islands National Monument, a newly designated monument where I’ve been working for the past two summer seasons, consists of 1000 acres of rocks and islands off the coast of Washington state. This was our first year with an SOS program, which meant lots of work for me choosing target species, working with partnering land managers in the area, scoping, and collecting seed.

Dodecatheon hendersonii (mosquito bill) collected on Patos Island

Eriophyllum lanatum (Oregon sunshine) collected on Lopez Island

Lomatium nudicale (barestem biscuitroot) collected on San Juan Island

I collected 21 species of seed while supporting a number of projects and outreach opportunities. Of course, I was not alone in my SOS adventure. I was assisted most of the summer by our intrepid intern from Western Washington University and had endless advice from area botanists and managers. Thanks to these people, these SOS successes and many days spent on warm breezy coastal prairies, this summer was incredibly rewarding and fun.

Now that SOS work has ended for the year, I am turning my attention back indoors and back toward GIS. For the next few months I will be working remotely from Seattle, WA to complete a vegetation classification dataset using Line-Point-Intercept data I collected in 2014. Although I am sad to see the end of warm weather and cheery wildflowers, I am excited about this project and its potential use for the monument. The San Juans Monument is in the process of creating a resource management plan and needs the most accurate information possible about natural resources, recreation, boundaries, etc to make accurate planning decision. My GIS layer, in giving an accurate picture of vegetation type and plant locations, will be an important resource informing these decisions. I am happy to be able to create a product that has immediate use (and I’m actually excited to sit in on these planning meetings).

Sagebrush Country

First, let’s go back to the beginning and I will describe why it was such a big adjustment for me to move to the desert and Carson City, NV. I grew up a block from Lake Michigan in a small town surrounded by woods, crop fields and dairies. My predominant memories of this time are of the expansive lake, snowy winters, morel mushroom hunting in spring, the smell of fresh cut grass in humid summers, and apple picking in the fall. For the last five years I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest where it rains for nine months straight, resulting in varying shades of green so thoroughly covering the outdoors that sometimes you forget there are other colors. So, based on color spectrum alone, Carson City and the Great Basin in general are very different than what I’m used to. There are many more purples and browns here, and my eyes took time to adjust to the lack of green. The air is drier, the smells are more aromatic (sagebrush!), and the city itself, well, people are big on guns, gambling and pawn shops. For the first few months I daydreamed about summer in Wisconsin, fresh peaches and moss/lichen-covered bigleaf maples in the PNW. Eventually, I adjusted and even came to love some of what was around me, but I can’t truthfully say it ever felt like home.

My botany internship at the Bureau of Land Management began ten months ago in the office, team members trickling in over the following weeks from different states. Actually, I think my first day was a field day picking saltgrass, but overall the first few weeks were office-training-protocol-centric. It was pretty tedious, but helpful to set a knowledgeable foundation for the rest of the internship. The field season slid slowly in with small projects here and there. I clearly remember what felt like our first big field day scouting for post-fire mountain mahogany planting sites. We trekked up and up until, heart pounding and lungs burning, we reached the top of a slope in the southern Pine Nut Mountains. The view of the surrounding mountains was awe-inspiring, and as the sun set, the day was imprinted in my mind. So this is Nevada – mountainous with wide valleys and a great view of the Sierra Nevada and beyond. The deep hues in the sky blended seamlessly with those on the landscape. A bright, full moon rose in the east and I thought, “This is a pretty cool job.” Then volunteered to drive the long road home, because even after the long day, I couldn’t have felt more awake.

THIS is Nevada (and CA in the distance…)

For training I saw Boise, ID and Yosemite National Park in CA and all the road and scenery in between here and there. We drove far to collect plants and seeds in the White Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. I visited places with names like Turtle Mountain, Hardscrabble Creek, Sand Mountain (where we drove past The End of the World, and kept going), the Petersens, Dixie Valley, Pah Rah, Silver Springs, Virginia City, Winnemuca, Washoe and Inyo. I sat, stood, hiked, trained, drove (and drove and drove), navigated, monitored post-fire vegetation, taught kids, talked to the public, planted, collected data, entered data, wrote reports, annihilated weeds, plotted maps, learned GIS, attended many meetings, and especially, I identified many, many plants and collected a lot of seeds for SOS. In 10 months I worked in freezing temperatures to 100º+ heat and everything in between; there were seemingly unending hours of scorching sun and occasional snowstorms, thunderstorms, windstorms, rain and hail. I’ve gotten to momentarily see places I wished I could explore for weeks, and explored for weeks places I had wanted to only momentarily see (if that).

In the end, it’s the places and things I wanted to spend the least time on that taught me the most. In the hours of tedium, frustration and utter discouragement, vital drops of wisdom were squeezed out of my perseverance. As the great Bill Watterson wrote in my favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic, “Go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!” Calvin is mocking his dad when he says that, but the truth rings clear, and it always makes me feel better. Now, leaving sagebrush country, I find that the jagged edges of frustration and disagreement slowly weather into learning experiences, and moments like the one in the Pine Nut Mountains stand out enough to make me think, “Yeah, despite the hardships, that was a pretty cool job.”

A big thank you to everyone at CLM, BLM and UNR for their hard work that helped make this internship what it was.

Balsamorhiza sagittata covering a hillside in the Petersen Mountains

Thank you,

orps

Carson City, NV BLM

View from the office parking lot on a frosty morning.

Things have began to wind down here at the Eagle Lake Field Office! My three fellow interns/roommates have departed Susanville, and moved onto their next adventure. It is a lonely place in the field without them and I’m missing their laughter like crazy!

The last day of work together!!! :'( Miss these girls so much!

It hasn’t been too bad working solo these past few days. I have been wrapping up the remainder of the SOS collections. All the seeds have been sent, herbarium specimens mailed to the Smithsonian Institute and UC Jepson herbarium, and photos have been organized. All that’s left is to send in the final forms and our season will be complete! All in all, we collected 33 collections of about 23 different species. Our collections included everything from grasses to forbs to shrubs. We were happy with the number of collections we made, and the variety of species we managed to collect. Working as an SOS intern, I was able to see parts of Northern California that most people will never have the chance to see and I have learned a tremendous amount about ELFO’s native flora.

In addition to working on completing the SOS collections, I also had the chance to work on my mentor’s planting project. My co-intern, Rachael, and I picked up over 2000 Mountain Mahogany and Bitterbrush seedling from the Washoe Nursery near Reno, NV. We were also sent a stack of about 20 boxes of sagebrush seedlings.

Some of the boxes weren’t so pretty when they finally reached us. They had already been on a long journey.

We packed the little guys up and drove them up to our field office to be planted by a GBI crew. Over the span of a week, we delivered seedlings to the interns, learned to use hand tools and oggers for planting, and had the chance to work with like-minded individuals who cared about the environment. It was a wonderful, but chilly experience! Of course the snow would hit the one week of planting. However, it made for some beautiful scenery!

The Mountain Mahogany planting site near Pilgrim Lake.

Here is a picture of my favorite peak in the field office, Observation Point. The fog was awesome!

I was also lucky enough to get some last minute exploring in before the snow hit! I explored the beautiful, bird filled Antelope Lake. The drive was absolutely gorgeous and the views, incredible!

Spent the morning of Halloween on a scenic bike ride along the Bizz Johnson Trail. I can’t believe this was my first time on the trail all since I moved here!

The beautiful Antelope lake.

I also made the trip to Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, to soak up some sun! It was a beautiful trip, filled with good food and great views!

A view from the Point Reyes lighthouse! This has been one of my favorite mini trips I have done since coming to California. The color of the water was absolutely breathtaking.

That’s all that I have been up to lately; an exciting month (with some sulking over missing my roommates), and many more adventures to come. I will be sticking around Susanville for a few more months, so expect some more posts in the near future!

Until next time!

Jill Pastick

Once there were interns who drove far for seed collection

It was there some bad ones escaped loupe detection

Upon their return

This they did learn

And then painstakingly recounted to avoid seed rejection

Sometimes you can only see bad seeds back at the lab, under a microscope.

Ivesia lycopodioides. Sadly, despite our over collecting, there were not enough viable seeds to send in.

Lepidospartum latisquamum. Bottom seed looks good, top seed never developed.

Atriplex polycarpa. This was such a hardy collection that even at 60% viability we still had more than enough.

Pictures for nearly every White Mountains collection were taken through a microscope (good vs bad seed). These will hopefully assist future teams in better assessing what a good seed truly looks like.

-orps

Carson City BLM

This week is the last in an amazing ten month internship with the BLM in Carson City, NV.   When I arrived here fresh out of grad school, I had plenty of education, but very little real world working experience in natural resources.  My time here has provided me with a wide variety of experiences and skills that I look forward to building upon in the future.  Here is a laundry list of all the activities us six interns have done here at Carson City this year: SOS seed collection, Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation monitoring and reporting, rare plant monitoring and surveys, plant identification, GIS map production and analysis, planted plugs of native species in restoration efforts, seven education and outreach events, herbarium production and management, mechanical control of weeds, and assisting range staff in rangeland assessment.  Of all of these activities, a few memorable things stand out.

The two seed collecting trips our crew made to Inyo National Forest were among my favorite trips of the internship.  These 450+ mile trips turned into week long adventures with brilliant views (see “A Penstemon heterodoxus Haiku” below).  On these trips we spent half of our time in the Sierra Nevada’s and half in the White Mountains, just to the east of the Sierras.  These trips were very fruitful (ha-ha), both in seed collections and in familiarizing ourselves with flora outside of our field office’s range.  The end of the first trip was highlighted by an opportunity to tag along on a field trip with botanist and White Mountains flora expert, Jim Morfield, who works with the Nevada Natural Heritage Program.

Another highlight from this internship was attending the Vegetation Rapid Assessment Releve workshop put on by the California Native Plant Society in Yosemite National Park.  This workshop was highly beneficial in that it taught me a vegetation assessment method that I was unfamiliar with.  But of course, the real highlights of the trip came after working hours when my fellow interns and I were able to explore the park.  This was my first visit to Yosemite, and I was quite awestruck by its beauty.  Of course, the valley was beautiful, but I also very much enjoyed walking through the many Sequoiadendron giganteum trees of the Mariposa grove at sunset.

The skill that I enjoyed building upon the most during my time here in Carson City, and will likely be among the most useful going forward, was plant identification.  I learned plant ID in a completely backwards way.  Assisting with research projects during my master’s program, I learned to recognize individual species within the project area.  From there I slowly worked up the hierarchy, recognizing some genera and families.  From my many hours here with my nose in a microscope and eyes glued to the pages of Intermountain Flora, I have gained a strong understand of plant taxonomy and classification.  I can now pick out differences between families, genera and species for a wide range of Great Basin plants.  Further, I am now comfortable with using a dichotomous key and the language associated with it, so I will be able to apply my ID skills to whatever ecosystem I end up in next.

One thing I heard over and over again during my master’s program was, “always try to add to and strengthen the tools in your professional tool belt.”  In a nutshell, this internship did exactly that.  A big thanks to CBG and especially my mentor, Dean Tonenna, for providing the opportunity for this awesome experience.

Sunset at Indian Creek Campground, where we hosted two educational summer camps for 7th and 8th graders

A smoky haze from the fire in Kings Canyon National Park envelops us while seed collecting adjacent to the John Muir Wilderness

Couds while ESR monitoring

Heterotheca villosa, key ID characteristic is it’s “double pappus”. Look closely and you will see two distinct lengths

Asclepias mexicana with Bombus

A salt flat in Dixie Valley, at the eastern edge of our district

Sunset Rainbow

Myself (left) and fellow intern, John, philosophizing

Greetings once again from the North Carolina Botanical Garden!  As autumn has progressed, we have been hard at work collecting more seeds of native Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain species.  In mid-October, my coworker and I far surpassed our personal record by making 37 seed collections during an 8-day trip!  With November marching on, the frosty early mornings are making me grateful that our SOS work is winding down.

Six months have come and nearly gone, and the SOS crew here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden find ourselves at the end of our internship season.  I could say that I can’t believe so much time has passed, but that’s not totally true.  After so many months of pretty much constant travel, I am feeling the need to settle down and be in one place for a while.  That’s not to say that I regret the work, though!  At this point, the crew has surpassed our goal of 200 collections for the year.  I feel a solid sense of accomplishment  about all these collections being banked by the Seeds of Success program.  This means that I have personally contributed to building a national seed bank to protect the genetic legacy of many native North-American plants.  According to the BLM website (BLM.gov),  “[t]he long-term conservation outcome of the SOS program is to support BLM’s Native Plant Materials Development Program, whose mission is to increase the quality and quantity of native plant materials available for restoring and supporting resilient ecosystems.”  I know that not everyone in this line of work really thinks about the bigger picture of why we are doing what we do.  I also know that I may be in the nerd-tastic minority, but I spend a lot of time thinking not only about issues of genetics and statistics that drive our technical protocol, but about how our project connects to the wider scene of conservation biology/ecology and land management in today’s society.  Suffice it to say that having the opportunity to do my own small part in building a big old germplasm library makes me feel that I’m working toward something very positive!   That same seed bank, and the ideas that helped form it, may help our culture move into the uncertain future of climate change, shifting land-use patterns, and ever-changing human population with more grace and adaptability than would otherwise have been possible.  Ok that’s enough of me waxing philosophical.  Here are some cool photos from our last few weeks of work:

I commute weekly to Chapel Hill from Asheville, NC. My westward trek at the end of the week means I get to enjoy beautiful sunsets while unwinding from work.

The clouds were particularly beautiful on this day of collecting Panicum amarum and Uniola paniculata on the dunes of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia.

This field season presented me with many opportunities to appreciate the beauty of the coastal salt marshes in this region!  This one can be found at the Frank M. Ewing Robinson Neck Preserve on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Another scene I have come to appreciate better during my internship: the eerie elegance of the baldcypress swamp. This photo was taken at First Landing State Park in Virginia.

For the last two weeks of our internship, my coworkers and I will tie up loose ends, such as re-naming photo files, double checking data sheets, and packaging and shipping our last collections and voucher specimens.  Most of us look forward to beginning the second year of this project next spring.   I hope everyone else had an enlightening and fulfilling field season.  Until next year, happy hibernation!

Hello all,

The Native Plant Society of Texas Symposium (NPSOT) was a fantastic experience!(minus the Austin traffic) The atmosphere of the symposium was both professional and friendly, as were the many representatives of the agencies present.  I was able to attend a botany field trip at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Preserve and  nearby conservation easements. The tour leader, a retired Fish and Wildlife employee, was very knowledgeable about the local flora of the area and enthusiastic about sharing his wisdom with us. Unfortunately, a few of the field trips near Bastrop State Park and the Lost Pines area had to be canceled due to a wildfire.  Topics presented at the symposium included: prairie restoration of parks, observations of the local flora, and the recovery of the Lost Pines from 2011 Bastrop fire. The presentation over the 2011 Bastrop Fire was quite ironic, considering some of the area included in that study was currently ablaze again. I would highly recommend to anyone, who is even slightly interested about Texas plants, to go to the next NPSOT meeting.

Helianthus maximiliani at Clymer Meadow.

The week after NPSOT, I had the privilege to be a guest on the Texas Nature Conservancy’s Clymer Meadow Preserve at Celeste, TX to survey for monarch butterflies and Ascelpias spp. I had previously learned about the preserve from one of my former professors, who happens to be the former preserve manager. It was an awesome feeling to be working at a place that I had previously studied in the classroom.

The migration of the monarch butterflies along the I-35 corridor ended with the coming of a major storm system that brought North Texas a tremendous amount of rain and cold weather. It has been three weeks since I have seen a monarch butterfly. The storm system not only ended the migration, it brought major flooding to Corsicana, TX, the town where my wife and I both live.

Monarch butterfly on Symphyotrichum ericoides at Clymer Meadow.

Stay warm my friends. Winter is coming.

-Keagan