During the month of June, I was fortunate to experience a diverse set of opportunities within the Palm Springs – South Coast field office.

One week of the month was spent at the Chicago Botanic Gardens for CLM training, which was fantastic. We had sessions on Botany of the West, Protocols for Monitoring and Measuring, and Seeds of Success training. The last day of the week all interns attended a symposium. I also had some free time to explore the Chicago area.

The Bean in Downtown Chicago

When I returned to the desert, my co-worker and I started on our biggest task for the season, vegetation monitoring of 118 permanently marked transects and quadrats throughout the ACEC (Area of Critical of Environmental Concern). This project lasted into July and we both learned a lot about monitoring protocols and the local fauna. Some plots were in the dry upland habitat and others were located in the middle of a marsh. During this project, I collected GPS points to compare to the random points of our GIS-generated map. Data entry and analysis followed the completion of the outdoor work and we are working on presenting our findings at the quarterly Biological Working Group Meeting in September. I have updated the GIS map, created GPS coordinate logs and compared different habitat types of riparian species found along the transects. Also, we discovered a species that was not previously recorded in the quadrats and spent a day in the field with the Jepsen manual and a Trimble attempting to identify and log the species of rush.

Reference photo of transect 11 USA 01 from the 30m marker to the 4m marker, with my coworker Joel and I recording species percent cover along the transect.

Typical upland habitat: most common plants seen were 4 different species of Atriplex and Allenrolfea occidentalis, Pickleweed.

Joel fighting through the Phragmites to get to the next plots, typical marsh habitat.

I also got a chance to help out a team from the USGS Las Vegas office look for Hiliria ridgia at Big Morongo Preserve. USGS is working on a seed transfer zone project for new native plant nurseries. The GPS coordinate for Big Morongo Preserve was based on a herbarium voucher and thus we were not successful in finding a viable population.

Picture taken from Big Morongo Preserve of the smoke from the Lake Fire that burned 31,359 acres of the San Bernandino National Forest.