Monthly Archives: June 2016

Hunting for seeds in the steppe

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I’m finally here!

For months, I have daydreamed about getting out of the Southeast and once again exploring the West. Now, at long last, I have packed up my things and driven the 1,500 miles separating the Appalachians from the Rockies.

One thing is for sure: I’m not in Tennessee anymore. The Wyoming Central Basin is just the sort of alien landscape I’ve been longing for – somewhere completely different, where I can take my next steps toward a career in conservation.

 

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View of the Wind River Range from the Sagebrush Steppe.

After a first week filled with paperwork, training, and navigating a few unexpected developments, I’m finally out in the field, learning about an entirely new ecosystem, the Sagebrush Steppe. My mission: to identify suitable populations of selected species, collect seeds for use in reclamation, and to go where no Tennessean has gone before. The Rawlins field office has had an unusually cool, wet spring this year, presenting me with a unique opportunity to learn more about the early spring flowering species than I would have during a normal year. However, even under these unusual circumstances, many of my target species will be gone before I know it. The hunt for suitable populations is on!

Last Friday I collected voucher specimens and preliminary data from my first site – an old lakebed in the “Gas Patch”, a landscape now dotted with natural gas wells. While digging up Lomatium foeniculaceum and Cymopterus bulbosus, I quickly learned that the copious spring rains had done me another favor by softening the ground, making for relatively easy collection of these tough desert species!  

 

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Lomatium foeniculaceum (that taproot though!)

This week, my search took me past the Gas Patch, down to the Colorado border. In order to look for shrub species, I tagged along with an interdisciplinary team whose mission was to provide input to a proposed gas well site. Even amongst modern energy development, the vast rangelands and rough roads, set against a backdrop of the Sierra Madre mountains, made me wonder just how much has changed since the days of the western frontier.

The highlight of my week was a trip to the scenic Ferris Mountain Range (fun fact: the Ferris Mountains are the smallest east-to-west range in the world!). There, my mentor introduced me to some of Wyoming’s loveliest and most emblematic fora. To put icing on the cake, along the way we discovered suitable populations of Astragalus pectinatus and Viola nuttallii.  

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Whiskey Gap in the Ferris Range.

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Castilleja, the state flower of Wyoming.

Faced with a wilderness full of species yet unknown, armed with my dichotomous key and trusty hand lens, I feel up to the challenges Wyoming has to offer me, and lucky to have this landscape be the setting of my development as a botanist and a conservationist.

Something to remember that bloom

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I am a bit astonished by how much the landscape has changed since my last blog post, less than a month ago. Some seed collections have been successful, while some populations which I had targeted have disappeared. Nonetheless, as species go to seed, some to never be seen again, at least until next year when some other intern attempts to capture a portion of their progeny, a different cast of later blooming species has taken the stage. I am pleased to have this new cast of characters to see and learn, and some of these relatively late bloomers may be prospects for future collections. As for those species to whose release party I showed up late, I wish a future intern luck and hopefully we will learn from these mistakes. When there was not a seed left to collect at a location, I was able to remove some invasive species before they released their seeds. That feels good, as I am removing native seeds from a location for conservation, to also remove some non-native competition.

Those seed collections that have been successful have been rewarding. The Delphinium and Sidalcea blooming in concert was one of my favorite sights this last month, and today I have seed collections to remember them by.

Delphinium and Sidalcea at Kanaka Valley

Delphinium and Sidalcea at Kanaka Valley

I revisited the Butte Fire burn area in time to collect seeds of Calochortus monophyllus and Toxicoscordion exaltatum, before camping along the Merced River for more collections. As I collected Lupinus microcarpus along the Merced River, I could hear the legumes splitting a few steps ahead of me, sending seeds flying but not into my bag. It gave me a sense of urgency. There were weekend visitors all around, quite curious about my apparently peculiar activity, so I was able to explain the nature of my work to lots of curious, friendly folks, many of whom want to know the common names of whichever species they have recently enjoyed seeing. I know from experience, they’re much more interested in a common name than the Latin. I heard from them a lot about “what a terrible job I have!” remarked sarcastically. I agree, sarcastically!

John Woodruff from the BLM Mother Lode Field Office in California

Calochortus monophyllus seeds at the Butte Fire burn area near Mokeluemne Hill, CA.

Calochortus monophyllus seeds at the Butte Fire burn area near Mokeluemne Hill, CA.

Calochortus monophyllus seeds released before my arrival to the Butte Fire burn area.

Calochortus monophyllus seeds released before my arrival to the Butte Fire burn area.

Roaming Wyoming

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As a newbie to the West, coming to Wyoming has been quite the adventure. The mountains! The badlands! Fossils! More cows than people! My time as a CLM intern has been rather short so far, roughly about a week. During this time, I have been a part of AIM training in Rocksprings, a hefty 5-6 hour drive from our Buffalo BLM office. This training emphasizes a protocol for collecting data that will be useful to certain projects that the BLM has going on and was a great way to learn new skills and techniques that will be put into practice once our team gets back to Buffalo. I’m looking forward to the work I’ll be doing through this internship and also to exploring the lovely state of Wyoming!

 

Corinne Schroeder

Buffalo BLM Field Office

Seed seekers

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Seeds of Success is only sometimes successful.

This is what it feels like lately! With summer edging towards us here in Ridgecrest the seeds are going FAST! The seeds are often gone faster than we expect them to. For example, upon seeing a flowering population and imagining that in a couple of weeks it will be ready and then one goes back to find that its almost all gone! This happened to us yesterday. I wondered if any other interns had troubles like this. I felt as if it was still a valiant effort but with a taste of failure. However, it seems there’s always more to collect. Perhaps not at the same location, but with 1.8 million acres surely there is somewhere else to go, right?

Last week I went to the Owens peak wilderness and after doing some monitoring in short canyon decided to go higher. Upon going higher I found a suitable population of Chylismia claviformis for collection that really excited me considering how it had eluded me the first time I had seen it. Senescing too quickly for me to realize what it was and that I should be focusing on it as a target. I almost wish the internship would have begun sooner to allow for more research time before the initial field season had truly began. But so it goes.

Last week we went to conglomerate mesa with our office’s wilderness coordinator. Conglomerate mesa is part of The Inyo Mountains across from The Sierra Nevada creating Owens valley. This is such a beautiful place.

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We were in conglomerate mesa doing some monitoring for vegetation in a reclaimed mining area. Wilderness Areas is an interesting aspect of the BLM and its management plan. The Wilderness designation provides a lot of protection to the land, yet a Land with wilderness characteristics (LWC) has much less protection. As I witnessed with conglomerate mesa. Conglomerate mesa is adjacent to Malpais mesa, a wilderness area.  However, since it’s not technically a wilderness area, it is open for public use. Including mining. This is a surprising aspect of land management to me. As an ecologist/botanist I typically find mining unnecessarily destructive, yet the computer and my cell phone and countless other devices would be impossible without mining so perhaps my labeling of mining as something “bad” is hypocritical of me. This is a moral dilemma I have yet to solve.

We spent the next few days in Owens valley making our way up to Independence to work with an actual BLM botanist! Mr. Martin Oliver. We began a Blackbrush (Coleogyne ramosissima) collection but as it’s a small producer and we were a little early it didn’t seem to be working out so we switched targets to a needle grass (Stipa speciosa). A much easier plant to collect. I was glad to see that I’m not the only one who inaccurately predicts seed the seed ripeness window. It’s truly a difficult factor to determine.

As the summer goes on I’m learning more and more about populations, their productivity rates and the conditions in which create a good habitat for an individual species. It’s important to note these differences when assessing whether the population will be of large enough size for a suitable collection.

Exciting stuff!

  • Robbie Wood