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| My very first live-in-person Joshua Tree!!! Seen heading east from CA to NV |
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| And tons of wind mills collecting energy up on the Tehachapi's! |
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| Bienvenidos a Nevada!! |
Ok, so in case you didn't know my reason for going to Nevada, it was to attend the national Seeds of Success Training Program. This is a program that was started by the Bureau of Land Management, that collects native plant seeds from populations across the country to be kept in a national collection for long-term rehabilitation and restoration purposes. Each collection from a species needs at least 10,000 seeds for submission and the SOS Program encourages multiple collections from the same species in different areas of it range to help with genetic diversity. When some plants only have 2 seeds per flower, you can see how this would take a while, if you can even find enough plants to draw from in the first place! But it's not impossible - since the program started in 2001, there have been over 13,000 sets of seed collected from all over the country!
So, with that explained.. I got to Vegas on Monday afternoon and decided to lounge by the pool for a bit, still working on my John Muir book. It was a pretty low key night since I had to be up at 6 the next morning. We met in the lobby on Tuesday morning to carpool to our classroom site - Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. I was absolutely blown away by the geologic beauty of this area - who would hang out on the strip when this was just 20 minutes away?!
So we got to class and did our training from 800-430, learning about the process and protocol, reviewing prominent plant families and gaining a better understanding of what this is all for. We started with introductions which was fun. We were randomly paired up and got to know each other for a few minutes and then had to tell the class about our new friend :) Mine was John, a restoration biologist from Vegas who had been working for Fish and Wildlife for more than 20 years, great guy - a lover of trees and penstemons. Anyway, there were some great minds in this class! Not just interns, although there were about 10 of us from the Chicago Botanic Garden (CLM) and the Great Basin Institute (GBI). There were people from all states in the west - Wyoming, Oregon(!!!), California, Idaho - and from all agencies - USFWS and BLM mostly and then a couple private entities. Great, smart wonderful people! After this first day of training a group of us decided to go to this little tapas place right by our hotel for drinks and food - great plan! Don't worry, I won't disappoint you! I indulged in a delicious farmhouse saison.. 'twas perfect!
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| Counting the number of seeds in an Erigeron flower (Asteraceae Family) to determine how many flowers from how many plants we would have to collect from! Each plant contains roughly 1144 collectable seeds, which means we could have our 10,000 in no time (9 plants?!).. However, Asters are known to have a very low viability rate (10%-ish), plus our population has to be at least 50 plants. Ah, the technicalities!! ;) |
So we did our first day of training and then the second day was supposed to be all field work. We were going to spend the whole day out in the field doing a mock seed collecting; the west has been especially dry this year, so we were going to do what we could in the field. Going through the whole process and then collecting in actuality if we could. Well, wouldn't you know it, the one day we're set to do field work in the desert, it pours!! We were out from about 9-11am, but the rain was just relentless so the instructors suggested that we head back to the classroom. Most of us were confused by this.. we're all used to these conditions in the field right?? But we were dressed for a dry, sweltering 95 degree day, so we gladly clambered into the vans and headed back. We had lunch and then finished up the few hours of work we had planned on doing the next day. The class was great and we really did learn a lot even though we didn't get to play outside as much as we wanted. I still got to see a great number of new species in what I thought was just a barren desert! Such beautiful plants!! :)
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| A rainy field day in the desert :) |
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| This is a tufted evening-primrose, Oenothera caespitosa |
But anyway, that gave us the first half of Thursday free before we had to drive back. So I and a few other CLM interns, decided to see if the GBI interns of Vegas (Elise and Sam) needed any help with some seed collecting that they were currently working on. They welcomed our help, and the 6 of us carpooled out to the east side of Vegas, into the Sunrise Mountains to collect Astragalus seeds. This was so great! A wonderful hands-on experience and quality time with great new people! So after a few hours of collecting pods of seeds we had reached their goal (that had already collected some on a previous day) and so we headed back to town. We exchanged contact info and then headed our separate ways back to our respective field offices. Kathleen and I headed out in the early afternoon and got back to B-field in the evening.
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| After a few hours of collecting from about 50 Astragalus plants, this was what I had to show for it! :) |
All in all it was a really great experience and I truly hope I can get back to that area some time to tromp around a little more, since time was so limited on this trip!! (Add it to the list baby!) I really hope the pictures I post do this area justice - my camera died the day I got there and I forgot my charger at home so all of these photos are via my phone, grrr. If you're not impressed by the shots I took, here is a website for the area, that is sure to please! I just love that I went to Las Vegas and all I did was take pictures of rocks and plants! I didn't even have an inkling to look for a casino or be drawn into some shiny lights; this trip was just how I wanted it to be, even if it wasn't as long as I could have wished for! Oh, if you have any questions about my trip or the area, please do ask, I'd love to tell you more about it!
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| View from our classroom at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area |
So here are some pictures from the Red Rock Canyon trip (Nevada)
http://on.fb.me/IB2SYa
and here are the pictures I said I would post from the Paso Robles S & G that I went on a few weeks ago
http://on.fb.me/JtVrq1
Thanks for taking the time to read, hope you liked!!
Love & velvet,
Rach
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