A view up our site, Hot Springs Mountain

Though it’s hard to tell, this pictures shows a wide ditch that opened after a landslide. It will likely facilitate future landslides if not dealt with.

One of our main focuses this week was a restoration site just outside Carson City. The area has seen a number of erosion events in recent years that have caused serious property damage in the nearby residential area. Our goal here is to revegetate the disturbed areas with the hopes of lessening the severity of future landslides.

We seeded two different plants, rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) and fourwing saltbush (Atriplex canescens). Both of these plants occur commonly in the sagebrush scrub community that is typical around here. You may be wondering why we chose these plants instead of the most common plant in sagebrush scrub — which is sagebrush — and we have good reason for this choice. Both rubber rabbitbrush and fourwing saltbush are part of the early successional community; sagebrush is not. This means that rabbitbrush and saltbush are better at colonizing disturbed areas. This is especially important for our project, because we need plants that will be able to establish a root system quickly and stabilize the soil. Additionally, with any restoration project, if you’re trying to reestablish the native plant community, you increase your chances by following nature’s lead. By seeding rabbitbrush and saltbush, we are mimicking the order in which plants would recolonize the area. Hopefully, this will allow the plant community on these disturbed areas to most efficiently develop and blend into the current plant community.

A terrible picture of me using that red contraption in the bottom right corner to spread fourwing saltbush seed

A newly-seeded trail

While in the field, we were approached by a few people who lived in the area and were curious about what we were doing. The first person was interested in the plants we were seeding, stating she would need to look them up later, and was just happy to see us out there doing something to help. However, we were approached by a couple people a bit later, and when we told them what we were seeding, they seemed pretty disappointed and informed us that rabbitbrush causes a lot of people to have allergies. One person stated, “I’d understand sagebrush, but rabbitbrush is just a nuisance.” Caught off guard by this reaction, I apologized about their allergies as they walked away. In my head, I thought about the importance of using rabbitbrush over sagebrush and how the amount of rabbitbrush we’re adding would be insignificant to the amount already present. Afraid to come across as argumentative, I didn’t voice these thoughts and may have missed a chance to inform some people.
Despite the uncomfortable situation, this showed me such a succinct example of something we are told so often, that you can’t please everybody. Even with a project that seems so benign, seeding areas to help stop landslides into people’s houses, there are still ways to disappoint people. This challenge of land management is something I hope to learn to better navigate. Hopefully, if I’m approached in the future by a member of the public who doesn’t agree with the work we’re doing, I can start a friendly conversation with them, not necessarily so that they agree with me, just so they can better understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.