After arriving in Rapid City, South Dakota, I promptly tested positive for COVID. This meant I spent the first two weeks quarantining alone and working from home. Home here is a little house in the hills surrounded by ponderosa pines, white-tailed deer, and the occasional turkey. But this last week I was finally able to go into the office and out into the field. And what a field it is!

    Coming from the thickly forested west side of Washington state, the wide open spaces of the Midwest are something to get used to. There’s seemingly just grass for miles, with maybe a scrappy-looking cottonwood or two sprinkled in every now and then, almost as an afterthought. It makes me feel prone and nearly agoraphobic, causing me to empathize with rabbits and other critters that get spotted and scooped away by birds of prey.

    My first day out in the expansive fields of Buffalo Gap National Grassland was spent working on our plot for BromeCast. Bromus tectorum, also known as downy brome or cheatgrass, is an invasive species that outcompetes the native grasses on rangelands. Oftentimes the cows will graze the grass down, but if it is missed, B. tectorum dries out and becomes fuel for wildfires. The BromeCast project aims to predict the invasion of B. tectorum in order to better control the spread.

    In the fall, my mentor, Jacqueline Ott, planted B. tectorum seeds attached to toothpicks (for locating the plants later) along transects with bare and control conditions. Our job now is to record the amount of seeds that successfully germinated and were still alive and the surrounding plant composition. Unfortunately, the number of survivors was very low– we hypothesized that this could be because the toothpicks planted the cheatgrass seeds deeper than normal. It is an interesting feeling to be frustrated by an invasive species’ apparent lack of fecundity.

   Although the vastness of the grasslands is new to me, a lot of the plants are familiar. The ponderosa pine forest system exists in eastern Washington and I was surprised that pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea), which is a flower I got tattooed with some other people in memory of an excellent field summer in Washington, is actually much more common out in South Dakota than there!

    My coworker, Myesa, is also the type of person who stops at every new flower and can take an hour to hike half a mile. We went on a little day trip to Wyoming to check out Devil’s Tower and saw lots of neat plants.

    Coming to a fresh ecoregion is exciting because it tests my plant identification skills: some plants I recognize as old friends, like Balsamhoriza sagittata; others I can identify the genus but the species itself is a stranger, as was the case with Castilleja sessiflora. And even further up the taxonomic tree, I am encountering families that are new to me: unpictured, but Myesa showed me some vegetative Apocynum androsaemifolium of Apocynaceae.

    I’ve only been out and about for one week now and I’ve already seen so many new things. I’m excited for the summer and what it holds.

Hey blog! Since my last entry Sahalie and I have been all over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The scouting season has begun! Our target species to scout for at the moment are Sphaeralcea (Globemallow) and Lomatium dissectum (Fernleaf Biscuitroot/LODI). We quickly learned it was too early for the Globemallow to be flowering, making them quite difficult to scout for without their bright orange inflorescence. The last few weeks we have focused on looking for LODI populations to collect seed from later on. 

The scouting process

The scouting process begins long before we hit the road. We usually spend a day examining topographic maps, and satellite imagery for the regions we want to visit, along with a thorough search of herbarium databases to see specific locations LODI has been found in the past. All of these resources help us narrow down a few places we think we will be most likely to find LODI. For this species we are looking on the maps for steep eroding rocky canyons with north and west facing slopes. However throughout the last few weeks we’ve learned quite a bit more about LODI’s habitat preference that doesn’t always follow this pattern! It seems that LODI likes to have an adjacent hill or wall to shade the slope they are growing on. We have also found it thriving on south facing slopes and in little gullies coming off of mountain drainages. After finding LODI on the steepest eroding slopes it was surprising to find it in the much more subtle topography changes of these shallow gullies filled with tumbleweeds. 

On the ground

Once we arrive at the places we’ve circled on the maps, the real scouting begins. Sometimes we get lucky and find a huge population instantly, you can even spot it from the road. Other times we will spend the entire day barely scraping up a population of 200 plants. 200 plants is the minimum number of plants we need in a population in order to collect seed from it. Over the last few weeks we have found populations that range from thousands of plants, hundreds of plants to just over 200. Once we have established that our population has enough plants we will begin to map it. This entails walking through the population dropping waypoints approximately every 30 meters and giving an estimate for about how many plants surround each waypoint. By the end of this process we will have a point cloud of the population that gives us a sense of both the boundaries and how many individuals it contains. This information is super helpful for whoever has to find the plants again to collect seed in the future. As we map we also collect leaf tissue samples. For each population we will select 12 plants to collect tissue from, scattered evenly throughout the area. Finally, we will take photos for each population. Each photoset includes the plant’s inflorescence, leaves, stems, base, involucres, the whole plant, the plant in its habitat, and a landscape photo of the habitat from outside of the population.

This months best “office” views

Hells canyon

Steens Mountain trip

I have absolutely loved this month of scouting. It’s such a good feeling to pick out a little point on the map of somewhere you’ve never been, and then to go there, see the landscape in person, and find exactly the plant you’re looking for! It has taken us to some absolutely magical and remote places and I cannot wait to see more of the Great Basin as the season continues!

Our crew has grown a lot this last month with several new Forest Service technicians joining the team. We have all become such good friends! Outside of work we have been climbing, camping, and having beach days by Lucky Peak reservoir. I’m feeling so lucky to have such a good crew and group of friends to adventure with out here! Here are few more pictures of what we have been up to.

Sahalie, Nyika, and Katie climbing at the Black Cliffs

Though it’s already been a week, it’s very hard to believe that our internship in Boulder City is over! It’s been (a little under) 6 amazing months in Nevada – I’ve learned so much through this project, visited so many different National Parks, hiked many miles, camped more nights than I can count, and made a great friend. It’s been a busy last few months, and an even busier last couple of weeks as we wrapped up, but I wanted to post a few memories that have stuck out to me since the last time I posted.

I also wanted to say thank you to our mentors at USGS – Lesley, Todd, and Sara – and to Chris. I have learned so much about Joshua trees, climate change, and scientific research, and have felt very lucky to learn from them and have their support. They’ve provided invaluable advice in terms of future careers and schooling, and have been so encouraging and appreciative of our work with them. I will definitely miss working with them!

And another thank you to my co-intern, Maddy. We just wrapped up a celebratory end-of-internship road-trip to California to visit Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks, and it was a beautiful way to round out our internship. Can’t wait to visit you in Idaho!

Hard to believe it’s been almost 6 months since we first started at the USGS office in Boulder City. Bridget and I were talking about how it’s such a weird feeling that today is our last day -it’s a bittersweet mix of sadness, thankfulness, and some disbelief that it’s really over after today.

The past few months have been so busy that we haven’t reported on the blog in a while! Between visiting all 3 gardens every other week and side projects added on outside of that, there’s been little time to get to our laptops to type up our entries. But two highlights outside of our Joshua Tree Garden upkeep duties were helping out on a Mojave plant survey project back in early March, and collecting data on periderm-stripping of Joshua Trees across the Mojave (periderm is what Joshua Tree “bark” is called since it is a monocot). Periderm-stripping is when rodents such as rabbits and squirrels chew off the tree “bark” for nutrients when they aren’t able to get enough from their typical food sources. This is likely linked to climate change with fewer plants –rodent food sources– surviving as they receive less rain.

We were also able to make a few more weekend trips, including the Grand Canyon and back to Zion again to hike Angel’s Landing! It’s been so much fun to adventure/hike/camp with Bridget over the months and become such good friends through all of that, our long drives, and living and working side by side.

I’m keeping this post short and sweet, but I need to say a few more thank-yous to our mentors: Chris, Lesley, Todd and Sara. I’ve felt that throughout this time, our mentors have all cared so much about making sure we’re learning as much as possible, giving advice for our future careers/grad school, and encouraging and thanking us for the hard work we’ve put into the Joshua Tree Genome Project. They’ve taught us a lot about research, the desert ecosystem and what it’s like to work at the USGS, which has been so valuable.