June was a pretty busy month for us interns at the Vernal field office. The month started off with a break from SOS work. We spent the first full week of June helping SWCA environmental consultants with their 5 year Sclerocactus monitoring study. Sclerocactus wetlandicus is a small, long lived cactus that is endemic to the Uinta basin. It is currently endangered and its existence is being threatened by oil drilling and grazing activity. This study involved us heading to sites of known sclerocactus sightings and laying down a 1 by 1 meter quadrat to see what condition the cactus was in or if it was even there. We also took cover measurements for other species and nonliving elements. The results were pretty disappointing. Most of the cacti were gone. Many disappeared without a trace but most appeared to have been eaten by rabbits. The reality may not be as bad as the study would make it seem. There could be cacti popping up in other places, but due to the size of these things it would be just about impossible to find new seedlings. Even when scanning a 1 by 1 meter area it is possible I may have missed a couple.  I would have uploaded a photo of a plot and one of the cacti but for some reason I am having trouble downloading the pictures so this blog will be all text.

Almost as soon as we finished with the cactus monitoring it was time to go to Chicago for the CLM training.  We received refreshers on the SOS protocols and plant identification techniques, and we also learned about what was going to be done with our collections after they were shipped off.  The talks were sometimes interesting, the botanic garden was fun to explore, and Chicago was exciting, but I certainly was not sad to be back in Vernal by the end.

The weather in Vernal was rather mild when I first arrived in mid May.  There were several light showers and the temperature was in the 70s most of the time.  That started to change around the time we started the cactus monitoring.  The area started to feel a lot more like a desert, with the temperatures reaching into the upper 90s before we left for Chicago.  This means plants are taking their cue to finish seeding and prepare for the scorching summer.  We lost two of our collections already, Cymopterus terebinthinus and Cleome lutea.  Both had promising populations, but when we returned from Chicago they had already dropped most of their seed.  We caught four more collections just in time (Astragalus duchesnensis, Astragalus saurinus, Atriplex corrugata, and Erisimum capitatum).  Next week we are going out to check on several more.  Hopefully we can catch up before losing another collection.