This marks the end of my internship with USGS Henderson in the Mojave Desert. It has been a fantastic experience, and I have learned so much! It has been a pleasure to work with amazing researchers and contribute to fascinating and relevant research! Working on a study related to Desert Tortoise, Gopherus Agassizii, has been very eye-opening. Before this internship, I had not worked with an endangered species, and I was fascinated to learn more about the regulations and legislation in place to protect endangered species!

Most significantly, I have learned an entirely new flora, informed by the Jepson Manual, as well as my mentors and other botanists in the area. From Phacelia to Cryptantha and Sphaeralcea to Oenothera, I have expanded my botanical knowledge considerably! It was a great experience to use a new flora (the Jepson Manual) and to think about different ways to identify plants (i.e. examining at Cryptantha “nutlets” for species identification, using bracts for Ephedra ID, etc.). I enjoyed exploring and discovering small portions of the Mojave, and the experience has inspired me to explore the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts as well.

In addition to plant identification, I learned some new techniques for data analysis. I learned that R is an extremely powerful analysis tool, if you know how to use it! I took some time to read up on R code and packages, which was very helpful. While I didn’t end up using it for this internship, I certainly plan to use it in the future!

After performing some preliminary analyses on our juvenile Desert Tortoise vegetation survey, I began to consider some important concepts. For example, species are often clumped by “native” vs “nonnative” species. However, these categories, while useful in certain circumstances, can be misleading. For example, with regard to nutrition, studies have shown some nonnative species to be detrimental to tortoise health and others to be beneficial. Bromus rubens has been shown to be of poor nutritional quality for tortoises, while Erodium cicutarium is actually quite nutritious, especially for juvenile tortoises. While these are both incredibly abundant nonnative species, they offer completely opposite nutritional characteristics. Discoveries such as these demand a more comprehensive set of questions than simply: “how do native vs. nonnative plants compare in terms of nutrition?” Instead, one must take into account various factors, including origin, abundance, caloric value, mineral concentrations, etc. These questions help drive truly innovative studies.

I also gained more GIS experience throughout my internship. I had the opportunity to explore the multitude of functions provided by ArcMap to accomplish tasks such as map ping our vegetation sampling effort and selecting candidate sites for our oil well vegetation project. Incidentally, I have also learned more about oil well production on the Colorado Plateau than I ever expected to know!!  Here’s a photo of a mesa nearby our field sites.

My internship exceeded my expectations, and I am very happy to have had the experience. I hope to work in this area again in the future! I am sad to leave the Mojave, but I’m sure I will be back again.

Thanks to everyone who played a role in my internship experience, particularly my mentors!

Cheers!
Daniel