December’s Update | CLM Internship Program Blog

Good news from the JTGP CLM team! We are gearing up our baby Joshua Tree’s for their final transplant into the Common Garden sites across the Mojave. These little ones have come a long way and look very official with their field-ready metal tags.

A group of JTs that are ready for their final tag–these long, finely serrated leaves are so wonderful to see–and to think they all started off as tiny, grass-thin cotyledon.

M. Beadle and N. Filannino working through the tagging process. We’ve all taken ‘ownership’ of a section of the plants in the GH. Its been great to become familiar with the layout and plants within our sections, especially now that so many of them are big!

We still have some maternal lines that are struggling to grow and it will be interesting to see if they pull through or if they simply won’t get to Gardens. As we all know by now: plant research is a dynamic and patient process! All tagged JTs will be transplanted in the gardens over this winter and will have at least a year to grow and develop in their given environments before JTGP leading scientists start to collect genetic and phenological from them (While my group of CLM JTGP interns will be long gone by then, I am excited to check in with our PIs and hear how everything is going in the Gardens).

Because our time here is quickly coming to an end our team has also been super busy organizing, cleaning up and structuring the many data we have been collecting over the past five months. We’ve mastered excel and dabbled in R and are continuing to develop and analyze the loads of info we have on the germination and growth of our JTs.