At the Plant Materials Center we often recieve contracts from various BLM offices or other land management agencies to grow out a particular plant for seed. This could be for habitat restoration, fire prevention, erosion control, or myriad other purposes. We work similarly to the Bend seed cleaning facility in that collectors send us the seed they want and we clean it and do some preliminary germination and viability testing before we put it out in the field.

However, recently we recieved some western needlegrass (Achnatherum occidentale) seed from a certain half-domed National Park that had us a bit concerned. The seeds were the right size and general shape, but were dark and the awns had zero cilia– the quintessential charcteristic of A. occidentale is completely pilose awns. I, along with our other CLM Intern, was tasked in taking the seeds to the UC Davis herbarium to compare them to specimens from the same area, and after some exhaustive keying, was able to definitively state that our received seed had been misidentified.  (We have a tentative guess as to the true ID of our mystery grass, but we’ll reserve judgement until we can get a full specimen).

Although all that tedious work resulted in a simple rejection, it was incredibly satisfying to help prevent a costly and potentially detrimental mistake. It’s easy to forget how important the work that we, as interns, do. We’re not just collecting seeds and running in circles (although sometimes it feels like it); the decisions we make and the actions we take pan out to make a real impact down the line.

You might think that the satisfaction of a job well-done would be the big take-home lesson from this whole graminoidal ordeal, but for me, the memorable moment came in witnessing the misidentification by Yosemite collectors.  Thus far in my internship, three of my seed collections have turned out to be non-target, non-native, completely unusable species. I had spent hours in the field and it seemed like it was all for naught. I was getting frustrated by my fruitless endeavors (pun intended), but in seeing veteran collectors commit the same errors, I was somewhat comforted. I’m sure that you’ve all been told how “the CLM internship is a learning experience”, but until recently I forgot that a huge part of learning is failure. As long as you learn from mistakes, correcting and adapting, progress is being made. The whole purpose of an internship is to try new things and get your hands dirty, and in that respect I’m doing just fine. I’m never going to forget those species that I accidentally collected, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to succeed and fail, alike.

Marc Bliss – California Plant Materials Center, Lockeford, CA