Chasing Springtime

After a month and a half of being here in Central Oregon I feel more settled but still excited about the challenge to cover a large land area to find suitable plant populations for seed collection.

Our Lomatium species are going to be ready to collect after some steady temperature in the seventies for a couple of weeks. The plants’ phenology were slowed down by wind, rain, and cold weather but not our cheery & fun crew spirit. Most of our collections are in beautiful rocky areas near pine trees nestled in the bottom of watersheds. Even so, work in Eastern Oregon is not all a field of daisies. A population of buttercup (Ranunculus glabberimmus) was heavily foraged, so we can’t sustainably collect from that site. I hope we’ll be able to find another population before they are crinkly brown and almost invisible.
Other projects I’ve been working on are making sure our sensitive Calochortus species has fencing around it so that cows cannot graze. It’s a good challenge in using ArcMap and GPS that will be handy for future projects, including Seeds of Success. We’ve also been working with other seasonals on monitoring sage grouse habitat. Unfortunately a lot of sites do not seem suitable for sage grouse, but the mood keeps positive as we work on mimicking the calls they give.

Last week we went out in the field with a wildlife biologist to see his vision for playa restoration. Many playas have been dug out to create watering holes, which have been trampled by cattle. The future vision is to put in wells and to even out the soil in the watering holes. Hopefully we’ll get to seed collect this summer for some of these sites. The least impacted playas have a good diversity of forbs and grasses that would be wonderful to collect from.

Overall I couldn’t have asked for a better place to work and a better focus in botanical work.