Greetings again from North Carolina! Over the past few weeks, I have spent a whole lot of time traveling and getting to explore the southeastern coastal plain. Since I last wrote, the crew first spent a week scouting SOS collection sites in Maryland, mostly on the Delmarva Peninsula, off the mainland coast. We traveled to several sites that we have obtained permits for, however they tended to be heavily forested or swampy area. We are searching for some species that live in these habitats, but didn’t find a suitable population of any of these to collect. Many of the species we saw were either past fruiting, had not yet bloomed, or were in insufficient numbers to be collected. It was a bit demoralizing to do so much scouting (and SO much driving), only to find so little to collect, but we did get some collections made in the more marshy places that we found. We also made note of good sites to collect some of our swamp/forest species like Parthenocissus quinquefolia (Virginia creeper) in the future, when the seeds are mature.
The swampy environment at Nassawango Creek Preserve in Maryland.
At a certain point in our scouting and collecting, we reached a place where the seed cycle was at a sort of natural break, between early-ripening species that we have already collected and later-ripening summer species that were in full bloom at the time. We took the opportunity to spend a week at our headquarters, the North Carolina Botanical Garden. We used the time to process, package, and ship all the seed collections we have made up to this point. We also continued our efforts to research all the species we are targeting for collection. Our target list contains about 160 species, and because we are not familiar with all these species off the bat, we wanted to be prepared to encounter these in the field. Our research has included learning the families and blooming/fruiting periods for the species, as well as looking up photos and, in some cases, drawing certain diagnostic characteristics like the shape of leaves or fruits. I have also been looking at how the species may be grouped together according to habitat. This part of the work has been interesting for me. Because I recently moved to North Carolina from the west coast (Washington State and northern California), my main goal in this internship has been to learn more of the Southeastern flora, which I certainly have been.
A shipment of our seed collections, packaged up and ready to ship to the SOS seed-cleaning facility.
The next week, when the crew traveled to the North Carolina coast again, our research immediately paid off. We were able to quickly identify many of the species that have begun blooming and/or fruiting since our last trip to this area, several weeks ago. It was also helpful to be able to quickly find out that some of the species we encountered were not on our list, and that we did not need to spend any more field time trying to identify them to species. When we got to our first sites, it was clear that our timing was good and there were species maturing that we would have the first opportunity to collect. These included Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) and Typha latifolia (broadleaf cattail), which we collected at Buckridge Preserve and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Preserve respectively, on our first day of traveling. We went on to make several more collections throughout the week, with one of the most interesting being of Cakile edentula (searocket), an edible member of the Brassica (cabbage and mustard) family, which grows on and around sand dunes right along the coast.
The dune habitat where we collected seeds of Cakile edentula. Cakile is the yellowish-looking plant in the right foreground.
Seeds of Cakile edentula
As late summer comes on, the pace of our collections is picking up. I can already tell we will have to prioritize what we go after as many species at different sites will be reaching maturity around the same time. As we continue into the next several weeks, can see that I need to take more photos so I can share my experience with everyone. Until next time, happy collecting!