3 observations from this past month:

A thin layer of moss sits at the sill of the botany truck window. If you roll it down, you can run your finger over the soft mat of vegetation, sometimes still wet from rain.

Fallen trees contribute to the soft hills of the mossy understory. If one has been there long enough, placing your weight on its decaying wood will leave you finding yourself falling through to the other side, where water in some form awaits.

With the right timing and luck, you might witness black bears eating grass. Or berries and deer. Or rotten salmon.

It is strange to think that I will only be in South East Alaska for one season, one summer. Especially when echoes of the year-round adaptations which have formed this rainforest are everywhere, so long as you take a second to look close enough.

Summer is go-time for everyone and everything here. Animals, plants, and Forest Service employees alike are all desperately trying to succeed in a frenzy of organized chaos, accomplishing tasks they’ve been waiting to do all winter long. Fishing, hunting, and foraging abound. Fawn learn how to walk on shaky legs. Plants expend energy producing colors and smells to tell the right pollinator where to land, and what animal it would like to poop out its seed. Fungi must spit out their mushrooms before it’s too late.

A common goal sweeps through the area and permeates the air like fog. It challenges us. Achieve, and prepare. Because, as the Starks would say with furrowed brows and foreboding seriousness—winter is coming.

It would be a mistake though, to interpret this goal as a reason to not appreciate the land, especially at the height of its liveliness, for all of its beauty and quirks. How else might we learn from it? For example. Large, fleshy fruits are not found in the plant diversity here. The Tongass National Forest Botanist (and my supervisor), Val, points out that this is likely the result of a short growing season, too little heat, and too much rain. All of which make such an endeavor not worth it to many plants. Why attempt to make a fruit that may not have enough time to fully mature? Or even worse, to put all your carefully stored carbohydrates into making one that could rot before it ever gets eaten?

Consequentially, I have picked more berries in the past month than I have my entire life. As of now, the list stands at: blueberries (three kinds), salmonberries, five-leafed bramble (a tiny kind of raspberry), (red) huckleberries, thimbleberries, (stink) currants, and (red) elderberries. Each one of these fruits measures smaller than my big toe—but (with a bit of plant anthropomorphizing,) this trend towards the tiny-and-mighty makes complete plant sense.

In this part of town, plants with fleshy, edible fruits know that any large animal able to carry your seeds to greener pastures will be on hiatus once the warm-ish weather leaves. So you’ll need to put out fruit, fast. Or at least as fast as you can, for a plant. Hence, small fruit. And a lot of them, to not only make it worth the bear’s while but to present perhaps a bird or mouse with the opportunity to take some of your seeds as well. Maximize your odds. Put lots of seeds in those fruits while you’re at it. Small fruits mature faster, and require less energy per unit. So even if one or two of them develops mold, it’ll hurt less. The risk of missing your opportunity to continue your genetic line is minimized. Plus, the ants will happily carry those leftover berries away, anyhow.

It is, figuratively and literally, the small things like this which allow me to endlessly marvel at the workings of ecology. Alaska is a prime example of how abiotic factors influence the dynamic of living organisms. How it has forced them for thousands of years to figure out a way to work in tandem with one another through stresses, all towards the basic endeavor of survival. Ecology reminds us that nothing which persists in nature does so in isolation. Especially not here.

This same reason is why Levi (my field partner) and I work to collect a diversity of seed. Because no one truly understands, at least not yet, how exactly that web of organismal relationships operates, or how intricate it might reveal itself to be if it is teased apart. And we risk losing it all, forever, if we continue to ignore that fact. From the berries, to the sedges, to even the stubborn seed pods of western meadows rue that refuse to ripen; there is merit in appreciating seeds of the entire native community, even if limitations force us to prioritize a subset. Who knows where we would be without them?

See you next month,

-Emma

July went by in a flash. Time flies when your brain is preoccupied with worries about nearby wildfires. The month greeted us with a week of 105 degree days, making fourth of July plans slip away and canceling our pre-scheduled scouting trip to the Feather River District, due to a rapidly spreading fire that sprang up near Oroville, where the temperatures reached 114 degrees. 

Along with the heat arrived the sudden surge of work we had to do as seeds were quickly reaching maturation. We abruptly picked up the pace and had no choice but to begin collections in addition to being vigilant with scouting and mapping and correctly identifying pesky lupines before they all go to seed (Sam and I basically memorized the entire key to the Lupinus genus from how much we had to repeat the process). Inevitably we were going to miss the collection window for a few of our populations, but we tried our best to set our priorities based on each species’ phenology. 

One of our top priorities was Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax). Despite its deceiving name and appearance, Beargrass is not in fact a grass, but a perennial herb in the monocot Melanthiaceae family, which more closely resembles lilies. Beargrass is one of the most culturally significant plants on our list, as indigenous groups in the area have been utilizing parts of the plant for weaving and food for many years. In addition to cultural significance, Beargrass was at the top of our list for being incredibly well adapted to frequent burning, due to its hardy underground rhizomes. A rhizome, unlike roots, has nodes along it, allowing the plant to reproduce asexually instead of relying on pollination. This, however, could also be a part of the reason why we often come across a population that has not sent up flowers during the typical bloom period— instead of reliably blooming every year, Beargrass flowering time can be difficult to predict, as conditions need to be just right, and other reproduction methods are available to them. With all this in mind, it’s easy to understand our excitement once we finally came across a substantial flowering population! After plenty of dead-end scouting, Sam and I found one massive population beginning to fruit, and got to collect seed from this important species.

Following the Beargrass collection, there were many days spent making our way down gnarly mountain “roads” in hopes of finding more plants on our list before the seeds disperse. Last week this seemingly casual form of exploration, a routine in which Sam and I had become quite comfortable with, gave us a reminder that we should always be prepared for the adventurous nature of fieldwork. By ‘adventure’, of course, I mean all of the thrilling unexpected obstacles that get thrown at you as you spend more time in remote areas. The wake-up call came in the form of our first time getting our truck stuck in the mud, deep in the forest with no cell service, all while wildfires kept rescuers busy and hours away from helping. We had become too comfortable testing the limits of our truck. We had successfully passed through many sketchy-looking obstacles with it— what was one more tiny creek?

We got home, eventually, after several hours of waiting for help, walking around to try to get phone signal, and staring at the vibrant swirls of smoke in the sky. The Park fire had started a couple of days before near Chico, and was already reaching 100,000 acres around this time. All day we had been watching as the sky morphed into strange colors, with large plumes visible in the distance. The way the setting sun interacted with the smoke produced mesmerizing light distortions, illuminating the landscape in an eerie blue-green light as the sky remained dark orange.

A firefighter was eventually able to come pull us out of the mud, after dealing with yet another small fire that had popped up in the forest. We got out, and slowly made our way back home, driving carefully on winding mountain roads in the dark for an hour and a half. The whole way back we reflected on the incident, and gained a greater sense of respect and caution for the chaos that comes with peak fire season in northern California. Next time, we’ll get out and check how deep the mud is before attempting to drive through…

              A couple of weeks ago, I cried about missing the summer storms in the Northeast. Not to say I don’t appreciate the constant 75-degree sunny days, but sometimes I long for the kind of rain that pounds on the windows, and thunder that shakes the house. The next day at work, it started to thunder for the first time since I’ve been here and stopped right after we took out lunch break. That day really cemented the importance of manifestation in the workplace for me.

              Lack of torrential downpours aside, the field season has been going great! The botany crew here at LTBMU has been finishing up our invasive plant removal for the season (aside from when bull thistle rears its ugly head…) and moving towards surveys. In our survey plots, we identify and record every plant species we find. Initially, this was really overwhelming, but it’s been a great way to learn more plant IDs. Our surveys have been concentrated in the burn scars from the Caldor fire in 2021 and are one way to document how the forest is regenerating from this high intensity fire. Although invasive plants have been popping up in patches here and there, the forest seems to be regenerating well, with many native species, like fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gaining a foothold. In addition to documenting regeneration, surveying has helped Gerardo and I find many seed-source populations of target species, like spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium) and Anderson’s thistle (Cirsium andersonii). We have also surveyed for several rare and sensitive species, like the veiny water lichen (Peltigera gowardii) and Bolander’s candle moss (Bruchia bolanderi). These surveys involved a lot of crouching in streams and laying down in bogs, but it was worth it to map these cute little plants.

              Last week, we took a break from surveys and seed scouting to work on an exciting collaboration with the Washoe tribe. On a stretch of beach on Skunk Harbor, one of Lake Tahoe’s most scenic shorelines, we constructed an enclosure for Tahoe yellow cress (Rorippa subumbellata). Then, within the enclosure (and surrounding area), we planted 300 small plugs of Tahoe yellow cress grown by the Washoe tribe. Hopefully, these little seedlings will go on to produce a thriving population. Tahoe yellow cress is an endangered species endemic to Tahoe, meaning it grows on the beaches of Lake Tahoe and nowhere else in the world. This little member of the mustard family is primarily threatened by recreation (trampling), so ideally our enclosure will allow the yellow cress to reestablish in Skunk Harbor. After finishing up the planting, we squeezed a quick swim into our lunch break.

              After a few weeks of surveys, scouting, and planting, I definitely feel more settled in. While I miss lush, stormy summers with firefly lit evenings scored by katydids, I’m finding new things to love about summer here in the basin: the sweet, caramel-like smell of Jeffery pine bark (Pinus jefferyi), beaches with perfect turquoise water, freezing alpine lakes surrounded with wildflowers, and the little groves of aspens that remind me of the trees back home.

The season is in full swing! We’ve been going to every corner of the Eldorado National Forest looking for new populations the past month-getting to know the area and settling into a routine. A few of our plants have begun to seed, and we’ve been able to get some fantastic collections so far. I have a feeling in the next month everything will go to seed at once!

There is something about collecting seeds that feels very human to me. Directly interacting with the creatures around me and being able to feel the potential for new life on my palm scratches something deep in my ape brain.

We’ve been paying attention to the pollinators as well. Watching the little world of bumble bees is a new way of thinking about the ecosystem for me. Absolutely fascinating! No pollinators, no seeds!