It was the most stupendous week for the Carson City Sierra Front intern team. We finished all of our fire monitoring fieldwork. As one of the most recent interns, I am fairly fresh when it comes to experience with fire monitoring. I feel comfortable doing them now, but it was still sad to see them go. The most challenging part of being a new intern is going through the process of learning to recognize all the plants by their full Latin names. While I remember at least the genus, or a 4-letter code for most of the plants we see, if we go to a new area with different diversity, I am fairly challenged when it comes to naming plants. This has made fire monitoring difficult because we have to shout out names of perennials and identify all the plants in our nested square meter area.
Our last fire job was the coolest of all. The standard routine for monitoring a fire is to first find the plot using various maps and a GPS, and then collect and record data. This week, we broke our routine for the first time by setting up two plots in a more recently burned region. When setting up the fire plots, we had to take into account the aspect of the slope, so that the slope was facing east or west, and we had to make sure the area was consistent in slope, as well as a few other variables. We ended up going back and forth between two less than ideal areas looking for the best place to set a center point for the transect that would skew our data the least. It was challenging to find locations that would satisfy the conditions required to create transect lines, however it sure beats having to find a foot high piece of rebar in a field of Sisymbrium altissimum; much along the lines of finding a needle in a haystack.
(Where is the rebar? Here is a fire plot that we had to find in the sea of Sisymbrium)
On our final plot, Mary, the other intern who joined the CLM intern team at the same time, and I collected perennial density, and nested density of the plants along one transect line. This was rewarding in two ways. First, it showed me how much we have progressed in being able to identify plants, as only a few plants stumped us. It was enjoyable for me to feel that I had learned enough to carry my own weight in terms of fire monitoring and plant identification. Second, I felt that it was a larger milestone in terms of having a more equal knowledge of the area as the other interns who had been doing it for longer. It was almost a graduation of sorts into being a full-fledged team member.