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!