Howdy

The word "howdy", as a greeting, has invaded my vocabulary. I wonder why....

Perhaps it is because I live in the true wild west.

Camping Out

Camping at the Red Rock Fire Area

My past few weeks of work have been quite camping intensive and I don't see much changing in the coming weeks seeing as our field season is now in full swing. A lot of the projects we work on out here, as the BLM botany team, require us to drive deep into our 5 million acre district to accomplish our tasks. Here, I'll give you the lowdown on a few of our most recent projects.

Three weeks ago we were in the Red Rock Fire area, where we so often find ourselves working on various projects. This time we were occupied with the monitoring of vegetation communities. after the fire in 2009 at Red Rock, the team at that time had set up four transect monitoring plots to be read for three years in succession to gain a perspective for how the vegetation recovers after a fire event, so it was our job to take year two data. We showed up to the first plot with a small team of five and managed to read/ gather all of the necessary data in three days time... This was a tough plot since the transect lines crossed a riparian zone (where the plant community composition changes drastically, making it a long task when you need to key out all of the unknown plants) and crossed over from the burned area to the non-burned sagebrush zone (more plants). Luckily, for us botanists doing all the reading, the last three plots were less diverse and we had our entire team of ten out to lend a hand, effectively completing the rest of the plots.

Last week we spent a total of three nights camping out in the Mono Lake basin, east of the sierras, to collect native seed material. As an intern for the CLM we are working in partnership with the Seeds of Success program, where it is our mission to collect native plant seed in remote locations for the use of fire restoration and to gather the genetic material for long term storage. This last seed collecting trip turned out to be more of a vacation than actual work. We were camped out by lakes for each of the three nights so after our long ten hour day of looking at flowers and gathering seed, we were able to go for a refreshing swim in the cool waters of the high sierran lakes.

Up Lundy Canyon

Yellow star

Eriogonum umbellatum. Beautiful, but not ready to collect