June 2018

One of the key objectives of the Casper Field Office is to manage sustainable livestock grazing on public rangelands. Rangeland health surveys provide an important way to monitor these areas and provide feedback to lessees about why certain aspects of rangeland health are passing or failing.

In June, we completed rangeland health inventory on six allotments — Marton, Snowshoe Creek, Casper Canal, Banner Mountain, Hess Draw, and Steamboat Lake. As a hydrology technician, my role was to inventory Soil Surface Function (SSF) and analyze signs of erosion at rangeland health sites. I set up a 10ft x 10ft soil plot and collected samples at 4 inches, 12 inches, and 20 inches. In addition, I checked both the soil plot and nearby drainages for signs of erosion, including surface movement, flow paths, rills, gullies, and pedestals. Soil samples were analyzed in the lab and used to calculate the percentage of sand, silt, and clay in each area. These percentages will be compared to pre-existing soil data and used to further analyze grazing patterns at each rangeland health site.

Working with the Casper BLM for a second summer, I have become much more aware of the big picture reasoning behind Rangeland Health inventory and the methods of choosing rangeland health sites. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the diversity of the places in which we work. One week, we may be working in a flat, arid, overgrazed pasture. The next, we’re surrounded by mountains and trees and cool granite rock formations. A day later, we’re wandering a sandy, beach-like area littered with mini dunes and rocks that have been naturally polished by windblown sediment. Each site has its gems: aromatic pine forests, rocks of every color, a young rattlesnake coiling and rattling at a distance (key words, “at a distance”). I look forward to the rest of the season and everything Casper, WY has to offer.

Here are some of the places we worked:

Steamboat Lake Allotment

Snowshoe Creek Allotment

Marton Allotment

Hess Draw Allotment

Casper Canal Allotment

Banner Mountain Allotment

1 September – 30 September

September was another busy month for seed collection. However, I was able to find some time to do more than scour the desert for a small, purple aster (Machaeranthera canescens) and stuff its seeds into a manila envelope before the wind snatched them up. When I was not collecting seeds, I could still be found out in the field.

Just another day in the desert. It was cool and rainy on this day, which made for one special treat.

I think these cacti are adorable – except for when they stick to my boots and poke me in the bum as I squat down to collect seeds! Yowch! Unfortunately, that’s happened on more than one occasion…

Earlier in the month, I spent some time  in the Caribou-Targhee’s Curlew National Grassland for a monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) monitoring project. The Curlew is a harsh, hot environment that has been trying to recover from the Dust Bowl. Yet a stream still manages to make its way through the desert. Along a portion of this stream is a population of showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa). This area is a prime monarch caterpillar habitat, as there are thousands of milkweed plants around and milkweed is the only plant monarch caterpillars can eat. I have been out to this area multiple times with others from the office and the community to conduct monarch monitoring. The monarch butterfly holds a special place in my heart because I spent two years of my undergraduate degree researching the migratory population of monarch butterflies east of the Rocky Mountains. I have enjoyed working on a project that I have a decent level of background knowledge on, especially after spending so much time trying to familiarize myself with the new projects of my internship. I also enjoy any opportunity to run around with a butterfly net. And, after hearing numerous adults laugh and shout with joy over each butterfly they caught or caterpillar they discovered, it is clear many others also enjoy chasing butterflies through a field.

Monarch (D. plexippus) caterpillar munching away on some  showy milkweed (A. speciosa).

If I wasn’t chasing butterflies or collecting seeds, I could be found working on environmental education projects. Throughout the month of September, I spent a couple of days a week at the Upper Mesa Falls visitor center northeast of Ashton, ID. Fourth grade school groups came out here to learn about the geology, hydrology, and history of the area, in addition to the program Every Kid in a Park. I led the students on plant walks and it was great to be around their enthusiasm and eager questions. I also think the Every Kid in a Park program is an awesome opportunity – every fourth grader in the nation gets a pass that allows them free entry to our national parks and monuments! The other education project I worked on has been a pollinator display for local libraries. The Idaho Falls USFS office has partnered with Pocatello’s Idaho Fish and Game office for this project. We recently completed setting up a display about native bees at the Marshall Public Library and it has been rewarding to see the whole project come together.

Upper Mesa Falls produces a rainbow every sunny morning and every clear night on a full moon! The Falls make for one incredible classroom.

If you find yourself at the Marshall Public Library in Pocatello, ID, please stop by and learn a bit about bees native to North America!

As Summer moves out and Autumn moves in, the field season has begun to wind down. It will be interesting to see what else I will be working on as my internship continues into November, but I am hoping I will get to spend quite a few more days out in the field.

Cheers to more adventures!

Shannon

USFS Idaho Falls, ID

I am going to say the cliche statement — I can’t believe how quickly my time in Reno came and went! In a couple of weeks I will be driving back east to Colorado, and I am happy to say that I will miss this area. I learned a saying here, “Reno: so close to hell, you can see Sparks”(If you don’t know, Sparks is a town right next to Reno). I use this saying with no negative intent towards Reno; it is a crazy place full of great people. I have made a lot of friends in this town, and it feels good to know that Reno is a place I can call home. To the west lies the Sierras where I caught frogs and fish, and to the east lies myriad Nevadan mountain ranges where I collected native seed.

Here is what I have been up to in my final month here: I spent a few days in September helping to monitor a wetland restoration project near Sonora Pass. I walked around as the “biologist on site” looking for any Yosemite Toads that may be displaced by the construction. In order to restore the meadow to make it a more wet site, the road crew removed the top layer of sod in and surrounding the unwanted ravine, filled in the area with dirt to make it more level, and then returned the top layer of sod. This will allow next year’s water to flow more slowly and into a larger area of the meadow, rather than directly into the nearby river.

USFS road crew at work on a wet meadow restoration project

This month, I have also been helping out on the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) campus. I worked with a current grad student (who is a botanical genius); together we transplanted some native plants into her pollinator garden on campus. We also worked on designing a dry creek bed where she will soon transplant more native plants. Our final project together was planting two beds of native plants at the USFS station in Sparks. These beds will qualify as an official pollinator garden for the Forest Service. We used about 15 different species of flowering plants that will bloom at different times over the course of the summer. I hope they survive the winter and flourish next spring!

A pollinator garden at UNR made up of native, arid/desert plants

This honey bee was happy to find this evening primrose open for business in early October!

Dry creek bed on UNR campus

Watering the newly transplanted native plants into their new home at the USFS office

Overall, I think that my most important gains from this season were the friendships and professional relationships that I formed. I met a lot of different people working for different government agencies, all of whom are trying to advocate for native plants and wildlife conservation. I have learned a lot from them all, and I hope that I am able to continue their work wherever I end up.

Signing off,

Zoë Moffett

US Forest Service, Sparks NV

My experience as a Forestry Intern has been incredible. Its foundation was field based learning and on-the-ground experiences that quickly brought me up to speed with all things related to forest management. I now have countless fond memories of warm days spent in the Bighorn Mountains, the ever present rustle of aspen leaves in the fall, and even some days spend snowshoeing through timber stands and falling snow. My work was not only full of knowledge and learning, but also satisfying and enjoyable.

I had the ability to apply what I learned and was able to work directly with my mentor to ensure healthy forest development and to manage forest product sales. She taught me an incredible range of forest management techniques and practices, as well as guided me through their application. There was a healthy balance between working directly with my mentor and working independently, so that we could continue to tackle our ever-growing work load. We worked out of two field offices, and there was a lot of ground for us to cover in the Casper and Buffalo Field Offices, and an even greater number of tasks to complete each day. I worked to set-up and monitor public firewood sales as well as establish areas for contracted timber harvests. I helped establish new access routes and walked timber stands with contractors who will ultimately harvest and sell the timber. Due to the multiple uses of public lands under the Bureau of Land Management, I have collaborated with wildlife biologists, hydrologists, range specialists, archeologists, recreation specialists, and geologists to ensure forestry actions do not adversely affect the public lands as a whole.

This opportunity has allowed me to see all aspects of forestry, instead of merely focusing on one. My time as an intern has been an invaluable step in the development of my professional career. When I officially had the position, I have to admit, I did not know much about forestry. Over the past five months, however, I have grown and developed as a forester, and now have the confidence and skills to orchestrate forest management practices. When walking through a forest now, I think more about the stand health and density, age-class distribution, and possible access routes, with the mindset of a forester instead of just enjoying the scenery. I’ve developed a critical eye for forestry, thanks to the guidance from my mentor.

While my time in Casper has drawn to a close, the friends, experiences, and knowledge I have gained will continue with me wherever I venture next. Thank you Chicago Botanic Gardens for presenting this opportunity, and thanks to Cindy for taking me under her guidance and sharing her years of experience with me throughout my internship.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a training: Interpreting Indicators of Rangeland Health (IIRH.) which helped situate the fieldwork I had been doing for months into a much larger context.

The purpose of this class is to learn how to assess the status of a given site relative to its potential. What this means is comparing a site to an ecological site assessment (ESA), or rather what that site at optimum potential looks like. For instance, before visiting a site, the ESA states that when operating at maximum potential the area that would have a variety of desert shrubs and be dominated by cool season grasses. Instead, when you go to assess the site, you note few mixed shrubs and an abundance of thriving invasives. Moreover, the area has become dominated by warm season grasses like Galleta grass when, in far healthier years, there was a majority of cool season grasses like Indian Rice. Besides this initial large species shift or “functional group change”, the site is also assessed along 16 other indicators which fall into three main categories: Soil and Site Stability, Hydrologic Function and Biotic Integrity. These factors are then given ratings and subsequently tallied to provide a numerical picture as to the overall health of the land.

These cumulative totals are used to help determine the amount of deviation from the sites potential. This conclusion then helps outline management guidelines. First, can the site be rehabilitated? Unfortunately, in some cases due to extreme mixes of outside factors such as drought or overgrazing- the top layer of soil or the A horizon is gone and thus the site can no longer be restored to previous speciation and potential. If, on the other hand, the answer is that the site can be rehabilitated then the current biological data will be considered in conjunction with management objectives and the original ESA. By using this multi-layered approach to understanding the optimal versus actual state of the land, Field Offices are able to build a more thorough and accurate long term management plan. Due to current extreme weather changing patterns, new understandings regarding management and increasingly imperative long term goals as soil health these long term plans are integral to continuing to ensure land health.

Personally, I found the IIRH training fundamental in situating my current work- a land intensification study using Assessment,Inventorying and Monitoring- in the larger picture of management. As a plant- oriented person, I often tend to focus on land health specifics as applicable to various species and the smaller zones in which they grow. While, that type of “spot treatment” is important– it is questionable if it is always applicable in the long term. An optimally functioning ecosystem is a complex web of interdependent factors where the health of one species is directly linked to the success of other organisms. By situating these ideas in a more, all encompassing approach to land management- it pushes field offices to work collaboratively as one must consider the impact of hydrology, rangeland management, soils and botany to fully and effectively the management of the land.

With only two weeks left of my internship and winter looming upon us, things have been slowing down in Rawlins. My co-intern and I have made twenty-one of our twenty-five collections, and now we are just waiting for our sagebrush species to go to seed. However, these last four collections might be tougher than we thought – I came back from a weekend trip of summiting Mt. Elbert to more snow in Rawlins! Since we’re only at 6,500 feet, I wasn’t expecting this much snow until later in the month…but I guess Wyoming wanted to make up for the fact that I’ve spent three snow-less winters in New Mexico and wanted to send me off with a white farewell.

Fog, and soon snow, settling on the mountains near the state line between Wyoming and Colorado

While we’ve been waiting for our sages to seed, we’ve been helping some departments around the office with projects – weed location with a specialist, raptor nest outreach with one of the wildlife biologists, and NEPA/ESA consultation with our mentors. Although this paperwork hasn’t been the most exciting aspect of our internship, I think it’s a really unique skill to be able to use later in life, because so few recent graduates have this experience and government positions value it highly. We’ve been going through permits and referencing maps for sensitive, threatened, and endangered species to allow, not allow, or allow with stipulations, activities that would occur on public land. We’ve also been accompanying some wildlife biologists on raptor nest projects, including searching for nests around wind projects, implementing new artificial nests, and visiting the elementary school to teach kids about nearby raptor nests and other wildlife.

Since we’d been doing a lot of tasks with the wildlife department, it was nice to get back into plants to help out the weed specialists. We went to two BLM campgrounds that are along a river to search for leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula), musk thistle (Leucanthemum vulgare), spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa), and oxeye daisy (Carduus nutans). These species, within the past ~10 years, had been routinely sprayed and we were out there to see if the spraying had proved effective. We walked areas that historically had one or more areas of the weeds to see if they were present or gone, and if they looked as if they were dying back from the treatment.

After my final weeks are up, I will be moving to Texas to work in horticulture at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. I am grateful for the experiences and lessons this internship and this town taught me, and will carry them with me on my next adventure.

Signing off,

Chloe

BLM RFO

One thing that I have yet to mention, that is kind of a large part of my job, is the tending of a milkweed production garden. I don’t have a picture of the whole thing, but it’s massive! It hosts I believe 3 different kinds of milkweed, and has around 50 plants. It was planted last year in an effort to get more milkweeds out into the Ouachitas for obvious monarch reasons. But….we have a bug infestation! I hate using that word because in the picture below you will find the milkweed bug. This bug along with aphids, assassin bugs, and of course the pollinators are all insects that belong in the ecosystem of the milkweed. Infestation implies something negative, and in this case I guess it is, too many milkweed bugs=no seeds, but I wish there was a better way to talk about it.

Not sure why the file was corrupted, but I quite like the outcome

This production garden is basically a mono culture: the bugs can easily find it, aren’t tempted by other nearby plants, and have unlimited resources to sustain them. Only in these kind of ecosystems do bugs really start to become a “problem”. This situation reminds me of an article I read in my tropical ecology class by Dr. Altieri. He says that if you start considering pests a problem, you aren’t viewing agriculture as an ecosystem, which is what it is. This has got me thinking about why this garden was designed the way that it was. It would have been beneficial to everyone if other native plants were grown at the same time. Not all my pods would be destroyed like they seem they may be soon if I don’t do something about it.

I wrote this a couple weeks back and in the meantime I’ve: gotten all the pods I can out of the production garden, the milkweed is starting to ‘die’ for the season, and I’ve started planting some other plants in the garden! I weeded the garden at the beginning of the season and all the weeds are back. I wish I could have kept up with it the whole summer but summer highs of 95, and sometimes above, made that a little difficult. I hope that next year someone who goes out to the seed orchard every other day will be able to check on the milkweed that way no pods will be lost to the wind. Because my office is 45 minutes away from the production garden it just made it difficult to effectively tend to the garden, especially because often there wasn’t anything else for me to do out there. This meant that going to check on the pods was a 2 hour endeavor that often ended up empty handed. At the beginning of the season there were plenty of seeds of other plants to collect in between the pine trees at the orchard but the mowers got a little excited and mowed down a lot of my flowers…Hopefully by the end of the season there will be some more seeds to collect out there.

Kind of off topic but about farming

I’ve always been a gardener but I’ve never owned my own. All through college I would volunteer at urban farms in New Orleans but I always felt that I wasn’t in a permanent place enough to start my own. I realize now that was silly because I planted some plants in pots up here in Arkansas. I guess I was inspired by the milkweed garden…

I’ve been reading the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. In this book one whole section is about rice cultivation. He talks about how rice is super finicky and could never be grown in the super industrialized way that corn and soy beans are. He stresses the importance of time and strenuous labor involved in the trade. With rice, the more time you put in, the more money you make. This isn’t true with something like corn where you can substitute time with chemicals. I really liked this section of the book because it goes to show that you can’t innovate your way out of every problem. This is why gardening has always appealed to me. The work that you put in leaves you with a tangible product. And this is why tending to the milkweed garden has been difficult! The way it was designed doesn’t leave me hopeful about the product. I just hope that next year the seeds I’ve planted come up and lead to a garden that is modeled after an ecosystem.

Of course the dilemma of the gardener is that you want ALL the product and don’t want any to go to the insects but sometimes the sacrifice is necessary! As a gardener, you are the one who is disrupting the normal system, you can’t expect nature to not give you some bit of a hard time. 

Ok, one more tangent. Before I started working for the Forest Service I didn’t realize that our nations forests are basically large pine tree (and other tree) production fields. Most of the work that people do in the office has to do with managing this land to make sure the production of pine trees is maximized. Hence why the forest service is part of the Department of Agriculture. It’s crazy though how differently the forests are managed as opposed to crop fields. It seems to come easily to foresters that the maintenance of the natural ecosystem of a forest is important but when you move to growing corn, that mentality is lost? I understand why. Pine trees were there to begin with, the foresters are just managing them. But where the corn is, there also used to be an ecosystem. Maybe short term it wouldn’t be as productive to try and keep some of the aspects of that original ecosystem. But long term, it would be really beneficial! Especially because letting the land lay fallow to regenerate wouldn’t take as much time, but much of the original plants would already be around! Anyways, just a tangent about how farmers need to be more like foresters (who are also just farmers). 

I have 4 more weeks here in Arkansas! So the next blog post will be the last one.

Altieri, “Agroecology: principles and strategies for designing sustainable farming systems.” http://www.agroeco.org/doc/new_docs/Agroeco_principles.pdf

Rachel

Ouachita National Forest

The end of my CLM Internship is quickly approaching. With only three weeks left, all summer projects are drawing to a close. It’s incredible to see how much my confidence and knowledge has grown over the past four months in the field of forestry.

As I write this blogpost, I’m participating in my Alternative Training Opportunity. Due to fieldwork requirements in Casper, I was unable to attend the training put on by the Chicago Botanical Gardens. Fortunately, the Society of American Foresters has their annual meeting in the fall. As fieldwork slows down, I was able to spend a week and travel to Portland to meet with foresters and leaders in the industry from around the country.

This opportunity has giving me a wonderful pathway to network with a vast variety of individuals. I’ve been able to chat with fellow foresters, well established in the private sector, federal agency, or state department where they work. I’ve met timber consultants, small timber forest owners, policy makers, and professors conducting research related to forestry and forest ecology. It has been an incredible tool to begin to think about my next step following the CLM internship.

Additionally, I’ve had the chance to attend countless science and technology lectures, as well as discussion panels on a variety of forestry topics. I’ve heard about the complexities of conveying academic research to the forest industry as well as the general public, panels on how to manage the forests before the costly wildfires devastate the land, and a quantified analysis of the damage black bears do to privately owned timber stands. Quite the diverse range of topics in a short period of time, and I’ve still got two more days of the convention!

It’s sad to see my time as a CLM Intern drawing to a close. Fortunately, it is merely the start of a new phase in my life. I’ve been very lucky to gain the strong foundation and on the ground experiences I have as an intern. I am excited at the prospects of what is to come, and will always cherish my experience as an intern.

It’s that time of year again: change is everywhere. From the weather to the flora and fauna to the people, everyone and everything is gearing up for the sun to change positions on the horizon. After 15+ years of school, I’m used to fall being hectic; this time of year always means starting a new chapter with a schedule that has you buzzing around like a bee. However, working seasonally adds a whole new level of chaotic uncertainty. My days aren’t done when I’m off the clock; my evenings are filled with job hunting, resume writing, apartment hunting, packing all my stuff up (again), cleaning. I have to remind myself that this is the reality of freedom. I wanted to work seasonally so I could live and work in a multitude of places while I figure out which ecosystems I’d like to study in the future, and with that freedom comes the drag of job hunting and moving everything I own multiple times a year. When I look at it like that, I can’t be anything but thankful for my situation. I’m so lucky to be able to explore the country doing work I love, and I know I’ll look back on this time with gratitude that I let myself float around like a seed blowing in the wind before I put my roots down.