Hey there! I’m a bit late posting this. And by late I mean like 3 or 4 weeks, so my bad CLM internship. Guess you know who’s busy working! So much has been going on lately. Fire monitoring, a lot of seed collecting, and educating high school kids, which is what I’m going to talk about, but I warn you, this blog will not be as long as my previous blogs.

So late June and early July, we were working with “Dean’s future scholars,” or, the DFS students. They had been working with the Carson City botany team, as well as other BLM specialists. We took them on a variety of trips with us, each day showing them different aspects of our job. We took them seed collecting in Smith Valley and Sand Mountain. Sand Mountain is a beautiful sand dune system about a half hour east of Fallon, NV. Not only are the sand dunes such a unique ecosystem, but the Stillwater range nearby is quite beautiful. It was great to take them there. We also did fire monitoring in Washoe Valley, and got to introduce them to a variety of techniques to assess the impact of fire on vegetation and soil. We also did a utilization exercise with them that none of us, not even our supervisor, had ever attempted prior to this summer. We basically took grass clippings,dried them, got the biomass, and used a variety of formulas to investigate the utilization value. It is difficult to explain in a blog, so I won’t get into it, but we put a lot of work into it, and it ended up a success! This data is actually going to be used by the BLM because the particular grass species we worked with didn’t have a utilization value, so it was great to do that activity and have the students be a part of that. Ultimately It was a cool experience working with the DFS students, and we hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.