My name is Mira and I’m one of the BLM Botany Interns in Roseburg, Oregon. My partner in crime/seed collection/field exploration is fellow intern, Aleah, and we’ve started the season helping with a project underway to collect native grass seed to eventually plant along roadways throughout Douglas County. As we’ve learned and observed extensively from getting to know the BLM land in the Roseburg district, roadways tend to be conduits for nonnative and often undesirable plants to form monocultures. While manual and chemical treatments can reduce these populations, a more ideal solution would be replacing them with robust populations of native grasses.

To find these populations, we’ve been using an old dataset from past seed collectors (including the CLM interns from our site that were here 5 years ago!) These past collectors recorded geospatial data with population estimates across a number of sites in the patchwork of BLM land in both the Swiftwater and South River Regions. This data has been extremely helpful, as most of these populations are still present in the same areas.

We took this photo at the North Bank Habitat Management Area while looking for populations of Achnatherum lemonii and Melica harfordii…originally documented by past CLM interns. We did eventually find them!

We’re also working on scoping out new sites, with the help of our supervisor, and the two botanists from the South River and Swiftwater regions. An unguided, exhausted manual search of all the BLM land would be impossible–there is an enormous amount of BLM land in the South River and Swiftwater regions of the Roseburg district, and much of it is difficult to access. Instead, one strategy we have been using is to overlay layers showing different features (stream, rock outcrop, etc) along with LIDAR data showing tree canopy in order to find likely sites where grass populations may be. We can further look at these potential openings in different ecoregions and classify these ecoregions by their temperature and rainfall in order to approximate what types of plants might be ready for collection.

Here’s a spot we hiked up to based on a GIS overlay…you can’t tell from the road that there is even an opening here, much less that it happens to have a number of native grass populations ready to be documented and collected.

With our (usually) trusty GPS and seemingly unstoppable truck, we’ve been driving out to sites we’ve identified as well as revisiting sites from past CLM interns and other BLM employees. Needless to say, fellow CLM intern Aleah Querns and I are now expert 4-wheel truck drivers and we’re certainly better at hiking up and down ridge lines. So far the four main species we’ve collected are Elymus glaucus (Blue wild rye), Festuca roemerii (Roemer’s fescue), Danthonia californica (California oat grass), and Bromus carinatus (California brome).

In the coming weeks, we will continue to scope out and collect grasses, as well as process them to be ready for the Bend Seed Extractory, where we will send them. And as we survey grass populations, we’re also keeping a lookout for a number of native species that attract pollinators, which may be our next project.

We’re also just keeping a lookout in general…we’re both new to the Pacific Northwest and every day in the field really is a treat for us. Here’s one last parting photo of the beautiful landscape we somehow managed to find ourselves working in!