It’s official: my least favorite plant of all time is Bromus madritensis.  Wait no, make that ANY Bromus species!  They are all equally evil!  I thought I had escaped Bromus handling forever after our field season ended a few weeks ago.  Boy was I wrong!  Apparently you have to check, recheck, fix, and refix all collected annual plant samples….and since most of the samples were Bromus, guess what I’ve been doing for the past week straight?????  GAH!!!!

End rant.

That being said, with a little help from my friends, I should hopefully really be done with Bromus handling in the next day or two.  Then I can start the cool stuff!  Our mentor is really excited about analyzing all the data we’ve collected while we were here, and she’s given each of the four of us interns a project or two to work on data-wise.  My project is to analyze measurements of ambrosia to see if there are any morphological differences between source populations or seed transfer zones across the Mojave.  Our mentor used an ordination test to check this but it showed depressingly little.  So I’m going to go back and run your basic ANOVA test on the measurements individually with the stats program, R.  I’ve dabbled a bit with the program (I got it to make a pretty graph!), but this will be my first real experience with statistical programs and analysis and I’m really excited about it!  It’s actually a little embarrassing how excited I am about it…so everybody cross your fingers for me so I finish all the stupid Bromus soon and get to the R programming!

In closing, I would just like to remind those of you in monsoon areas to keep an eye out.  Stay out of washes during flash flood watches!  Storms are cool (I actually witnessed a palm tree burn after it got hit by lightning last week), but floods are bad, mkay?  Stay safe out there!