Hello again,
Another month has fled by here at the Surprise Valley. The month of July started out by attending a week long great workshop with the Great Basin Institute, Eagle Lake and Alturas Field Offices staff going over the Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) Strategy- ( Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation (ESR) monitoring protocol) the workshop was presented to us by researchers of the ARS Jornada Experimental Station. The protocol covered the whole process of establishing and running a monitoring plot. Several techniques include site characterization; in which the general area is described, soil profile description, plant species list, line intercept point, gap measurements, quadrat density and belt transects. It was a great opportunity to meet people in our field of work and of course acquire more useful knowledge to work towards managing natural resources.
The rest of the month we have been working on the ESR monitoring on an area disturbed by a wildfire last year. The whole process did not look that hard or time consuming during the workshop compared to how it really works on the actual site. We are still getting the hand of it but it is going smoother as we get more experience on it. Also on the days we are not monitoring I get some time to work on the seed collection which is going good, we have collected a good amount of species and still waiting for others to seed out. On one of the collections we partner up with the FFA club students from the local high school and collected Purshia tridentata (antelope bitterbrush) seed which will be started on their greenhouses and later on the seedlings will be planted on areas recovering from fire. I still get to help out the wildlife staff with which I had the chance to do some surveys on big horn sheep, help out in sage grouse habitat improvement projects and earlier this week I got the chance to help out the Modoc Wildlife Refuge do some duck banding which was a fun learning experience.
Until next time,
Hector Elias
2013 CLM Intern
BLM Surprise Field Office
