So I’m closing out my third month as an intern in Marina, California. Let’s see, I’ve been to the office twice, and spent the rest of my time in the field or working out of my bedroom/office; which looks far more like an herbarium, library, and backpackers crash pad. Stacks of dried tissue, seeds, specimens, cardboard, rocks with lichens on them, presses, and papers are building up around me and it’s becoming hard to navigate throughout the room. This is definitely how a room should look!
Joaquin Rocks
The winter and spring of 2017 were uncharacteristically wet for California. As a result the spring blooms have lasted much longer, and nearly all the species present are coming up. The higher precipitation allows for some weedier more mesic plants to displace some species; but in general everything is emerging- just not always in huge quantities. It seems the richness is here, but the diversity if skewed.
Most importantly this rain has prolonged the bloom in California, allowing me to see a lot more species than I would have been able to otherwise. It’s a total blessing for anyone who is very interested in the study of the flora of Western North America.
My mentor has well botanized the area we work in, so it’s a lot harder to make valuable contributions here than it generally has been in my previous internships. However, some of my highlights so far have been in developing understandings of some rare plants micro-habitats. In particuliar for: Phacelia phacelioides, Astragalus lentiginosus var. idriaensis, Allium howelli, as well as working through identifying slews of Eschscholzia hypecoides. Aside from this I have been continuing along my floristic mission of collecting all species in our field office. This has been fun and challenging, now most of my office work just consists of making hundreds of herbaria labels, which I guarantee you is not the most fun part. Additional activities have been making seed collection and traveling along on rare plant monitoring work.
Im my free time I have been traveling around California collecting Apioids for the PENA project, some Onagrads, and a couple other groups. I’ve also been working on collecting >95% of the flowering plants I see along my travels, which is pretty time intensive. It turns out I’m just kinda falling into being a taxonomist, which is strange because a few ecology professors always use to oftentimes liken me to Gleason.
come for the waterfall, stay for the Carex
Recently I have still been reading Thompson’s “the Co-evolutionary Process” and assorted papers on genomics and desert ecology. Unfortunately not much time reading recently, I’ve been busy collecting and planning expeditions. I’ve been studying for the GRE too, which has got to be the biggest waste of time in my life. This feels like reading a dictionary to find a ton of fancy words to say at a party to impress people; rather than developing interesting ideas for their own merit and generally being a well rounded person.