Summer showers bring fall flowers

Bighorn Mountain Wilderness near Ruby Canyon

Spring time is the season when I usually get reacquainted with all my old flowering friends, go on wildflower walks, and spend lots of time doing what I love best; looking for plants! Who would have thought that late summer and fall could be just as amazing and floriferous as the spring season? There are currently billowing fields of flowers in California’s desert that resulted from several significant storms this past summer in August and September. This year I have been able to take several field trips to view the spectacle of desert flowers at a site called the Bighorn Mountain Wilderness.

The Bighorn Mountain Wilderness is the subject of an ongoing RSABG research project to inventory and create a checklist of all the plants that occur in the area with special attention to documenting rare and invasive plants. The Wilderness is 38,502 acres and set back against the north side the San Bernardino Mountains in San Bernardino County, California. Our partners on this project are the Bureau of Land Management and the San Bernardino National Forest who both manage portions of the wilderness.

Fields of brightly covered chinchweed blanket the floor

Last week on 26 September 2013, 12 staff and students from RSABG set out to document the spectacular fall bloom.The area is difficult to access without a four-wheel drive vehicle; therefore few botanists have documented plants in the Wilderness prior to our study. After traveling one hour via dirt road and one flat tire, we got to our survey sites and found an abundance of summer annuals. We also found perennials that normally bloom in the spring, but have perked up in response to the summer rain.  

The summer annuals that predominate and form carpets in the Bighorn Mountain Wilderness are: fringed amaranth (Amaranthus fimbriatus), needle grama (Bouteloua aristidoides), six weeks grama (Bouteloua barbata), Sonoran sandmat (Euphorbia micromeria), Yuma sandmat (Euphorbia setiloba), and chinchweed (Pectis papposa).

Other less common annuals include windmills (Allionia incarnata) and spinderling (Boerhavia triquetra var. intermedia).  Shrubs in the sunflower family such as wedgelead goldenbush (Ericamerica cuneata), rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa), round-leaf rabbitbrush (Ericameria teritifolia), and scale broom (Lepidospartum squamatum) are approaching full flower and create a haze of yellow across the landscape.

Mirabilis (four o'clock) in bloom in September 2013

If you have a chance to get out and see this spectacular bloom I would hightly recommend it.  Swaths of blooming plants can be seen just outside of the Bighorn Mountain Wilderness, north of Yucca Valley near the town of Landers. There in Johnson Valley you will find fields of chinchweed and spiny senna (Senna armata). There are also several other locations to see the unusual green cast in desert.  If you head out along I-10 towards Desert Center you will find octotillo (Fouquieria splendens), pallo verde (Parkinsonia florida), and ironwood (Olneya tesota) lush and green with some plants in flower and fields of gramma grass (Bouteloua sp.). 

Stay tuned to our website for updates on our progress and findings in the Bighorn Mountain Wilderness and visit our photo album to see more.  The area is an interesting transition zone between the Mojave and Sonoran deserts and the interior mountains of southern California. Over the course of our study we are sure to have many interesting discoveries that will enhance our knowledge of California’s diverse flora.

A glorious week with the GLORIA project

Telescope Peak rises to 11,042 ft

This past weekend I had the opportunity to participate in a global monitoring project in Death Valley National Park. The project is called GLORIA (global observation research initiative in alpine environments) and is a worldwide coordinated effort to monitor climate change and its effects on alpine plants on the top of the world’s highest mountains. I have been aware of this project for sometime, so I was really excited when I learned it was going to be set up for the first time in the Panamint Mountains in Death Valley National Park. I joined the GLORIA botany team from June 24-27 to help with plant identification and gathering data in the vegetation plots. When I told my friends and co-workers that I was headed to Death Valley National Park in late June, everyone thought I was crazy! People immediately thought of the extreme heat in the low valleys and I realized that not many people are aware that there is a large mountain range called the Panamint Mountains that towers above the valley floor. Telescope Peak is the tallest summit in the Panamint Range and rises to 11,042 ft. The peak was our ultimate destination for the project, and on the final day I was able to summit the mountain and enjoy the view

Calochortus panamintensis

On the trip I learned a lot about more about GLORIA. The GLORIA project was first initiated at the University of Vienna in Austria in 2001. The goal of the project is to create a network of monitoring stations that use a standardized and universal protocol to detect changes in vegetation that are due to changes in climate. The project is now being implemented around the world with GLORIA plots in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. California was the first to established sites in the western hemisphere with GLORIA plots established in 2004 in the White Mountains and in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada. There are now seven areas set up in California that will be resurveyed every five years. One of my goals in helping out with the GLORIA project was to find out how we can apply these methods to our high alpine summits in southern California. San Gorgonio Mountain in the San Bernardino Mountains rises just over 11,500 ft. This is our most significant alpine area in southern California with several species known only from the highest elevations and other species that have their southern most populations here. Having a GLORIA site in southern California will not only give us the tools to understand how climate change is affecting our local alpine species, but will also allow us to learn how changes here compare with changes around the world. To learn more about the GLORIA project in California you can visit this website, and to learn more about the GLORIA project globally you can visit this site. To see more pictures of my trip go here and here!

Hunting for Botanical Biodiversity, Joshua Tree National Park

Lost Palms Oasis, Joshua Tree National Park

Imagine if we could gather together an enthusiastic multitude of biologists and interested citizens to comb through a location on a single weekend, seeking to identify every living thing that occurs in that one spot. Think of how much we could learn about ecological complexity, and of how the dimension of our knowledge of that place would unfold like a Chinese fan. It is like we are taking a biological snapshot, capturing a record of everything that is there at that point in time. Holding such a gathering is the aim of a “Bioblitz”, or Biodiversity Hunt: to positively identify as many species as possible over a day or two in a delineated area.
Staff at Joshua Tree National Park organized a series of four Biodiversity Hunts over the past three years, assembling more than 100 people to search, identify, and report on the biological richness of the park’s desert wetlands, the focus of this project. Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (RSABG) botanists have been present at all four of these hunts, applying their botanical expertise to assist the National Park to identify plant species that reside within their boundaries, and more generally benefiting knowledge of Southern California’s botanical richness.

In March and April a group of botanists from the Garden, including Naomi Fraga, Sarah Degroot, Evan Meyer, Abby Hird, Loraine Washburn and Jessica Chu participated in the last two of these four Biodiversity Hunts. We spent four full days in Joshua Tree, doing thorough surveys for plants that occur around Cottonwood Springs and the Lost Palms Oasis, near the south entrance, and in Smithwater Canyon in the northwest of the Park. We joined birders, herpetologists, entomologists, and arachnologists, as well as students, photographers, and interested community members in a wide-ranging survey of these remarkable desert wetlands.

In March at Cottonwood Springs and Lost Palms Oasis, RSABG botanists fanned out into the washes and slopes, identifying common and dominant species as well as hunting for microsites where less common elements might be found, such as against a north-facing cliff face, in a more humid seep, or where the soil became richer in clay. We appreciated the shade of palms and cottonwoods as we hunted along the edges of the pools, where we found ferns (Cheilanthes covillei), rushes (Juncus acutus), and orchids (Epipactis gigantea) in the wetter parts of the oases.

By the end of the March weekend, the collected effort of all bio-hunters had identified more than 558 species, including more than 200 species of plants and 300 species of insects, as well as 32 bird species, 12 reptiles, seven mammals, and one amphibian species. For our part, we found many plant species that had not been documented before for this location in the Park, and at least one species that was new to the Joshua Tree park plant list.

The April Biodiversity Hunt at Smithwater Canyon focused on one of Joshua Tree National Park’s richest areas for plant diversity, due to its higher elevation, perennial water flow, and steep canyon walls that form diverse microhabitats for plants, as well as its location in the transition between the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. We were fortunate on Friday to be joined by Tasha La Doux, a Ph.D. graduate of RSABG’s program, who now divides her time between Joshua Tree and the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center in the Mojave. We were also joined by Darryl Slate, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateur botanist who lives near the park. In our two day hunt at Smithwater Canyon we found 160 species of plant, both common and rare species, as well as contributing the sole sighting of a speckled rattlesnake to the reptile list. Due to the dry spring in the desert, the abundance of spring annuals has been quite modest throughout the Park, resulting in an under-representation of total plant diversity.

Earth’s biological richness belongs to all of us. A deep appreciation of the biodiversity of a place can stem from an understanding of the geological and biological history of that place, and can also help the human population of the planet deepen its connection to the other species that share their piece of the planet. We hope, also, that encouraging people to know the organisms around them will deepen their caring for wild species enduring presence on Earth. RSABG’s conservation efforts aim to increase the chances that California’s flora survives intact to the world of our great-grandchildren. Field studies such as our Biodiversity Hunt participation at Joshua Tree helps this effort by assuring that we know what grows where, while also helping federal resource managers do their job effectively, by helping them to know more about the biological diversity they are protecting.

Rare Plant Treasure Hunt

Several years ago Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (RSABG) teamed up with the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) through a contract grant from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Department of Fish and Wildlife to do rare plant surveys across California deserts as part of the Rare Plant Treasure Hunt (RPTH) program. Last year marked the third year for RPTH, a program created and named by Josie Crowford of CNPS.

A Rare Plant Tresature Hunt group travels out to Castle Peaks. Photo: Kim Clark

It is largely a citizen-science program with the goal of getting volunteers out in the field to experience California wild places and assist in rare plant surveys. These surveys largely target rare plant populations that haven’t been revisited in more than 20 years in order to evaluate the current status of these populations.

Many people may be under the impression that the desert is nothing rocks, lizards and an occasional spiny plant—an open wasteland to be crossed to get to Las Vegas or Lake Havasu. But California deserts hold more than 35 percent of the flora of California and have some of the areas of highest diversity for the state. There are many botanically unexplored mountain ranges and valleys out there. In 2012 alone, there were five plant species found in California deserts new to science described by RSABG scientists and researchers.

The Rare Plant Treasure Hunt program largely focuses on the California deserts often associated with the development of renewable energy projects. There are currently thousands of acres proposed for possible development, of which a great deal has had little botanical exploration.

It is the goal of the RPTH program to get volunteers out to these places to experience them first hand and to educate others on California’s diverse flora and the importance of its conservation.

Coryphantha alversonni in the Big Marias Mountains. Photo: Kim Clark.

Volunteers from the Sierra Club, the Desert Survivors Organizations, HabitatWorks, The Wildlands Conservancy, CNPS chapters and subchapters from across California have often participated with Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in the Rare Plant Treasure Hunt. But many volunteers were not affiliated with any particular organization, but were just interested in joining the group to explore and learn about the desert and to have a personal experience with these wild places while doing so.

The spring field season in 2012 was one of the driest years on record for the California deserts; most areas got only 0.01 millimeters of rain or absolutely no rain at all. Watching the doppler in the winter of 2011-12 was often like watching a blank screen as there was so little weather action. Watching the weather stations and dopplers frequently helps plant scientists predict which areas may have germination or bloom. But even in dry years, the desert rarely disappoints and almost every area visited had at least one rare plant population if not dozens.

The summer field season seemed to the opposite as some parts of the California deserts received the most summer rain they have received in more than a decade. The eastern Mojave in particular had an amazing summer bloom and RSABG/RPTH participants were able to document around 100 rare plant populations on just a few trips.

A total of 24 trips were made in 2012. These trips ranged from day trips to three-day excursions into very remote places. We started in March at below sea level around the Salton Sea, topped out on Southern California’s highest peak on Mount San Gorgonio at 11,500 feet in July, and then headed back down to the lower elevations following the summer monsoonal storms in September. We documented around 300 rare plant populations. Many of these were newly documented. We trekked into the Panamint Mountains and found the type locality of the Panamint daisy (Enceliopsis covillei), which is the plant that has always adorned, and will continue to adorn, the CNPS logo; this population had not been revisited since Frederick Coville made the first collection of this plant in 1891 on the Death Valley expedition. The new species was later named for him. We found the first population of Abrams spurge (Chamaesyce abramsiana) in Imperial County in 100 years; all historic populations from Imperial County are likely extirpated due to development and agriculture. We documented many range extensions of rare plants, locating populations where they had never been found before. We provided information that aided in the evaluation of plant species for the CNPS inventory, including information about its abundance (or lack thereof!) in California and about threats to historic occurrences of a given species. We had many wonderful treks into some amazing places and spent many nights under star filled skies. All in all, it was a very successful and productive year.

If you would like to learn more about the Rare Plant Treasure Hunt program please visit the Rare Plant Treasure Hunt Website.

In search of star phacelia

Phacelia stellaris with a swiss army knife for scale

Phacelia stellaris is is a tiny annual herb in the borage or forget-me-not family (Boraginaceae). Its common name is star phacelia which is derived from its latin epithet stellaris, meaning star. I find that name particularly fitting since the plant looks like a little star in the sand when it flowers. This is the first year I have had the privilege to see this species in the field.  For someone who loves belly plants (like me!), this plant is a show stopper! Phacelia stellaris has pale lavender to purple flowers, and a bluish green cast to the leaves.  It gracefully hides itself in the sand and because of this it takes several very skilled botanists with eagle eyes to find them! Its no wonder that there are few recent observations of this species across its range in California.

Phacelia stellaris is considered rare by the California Native Plant Society and is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  This species is of concern because it is known from just a few location in southern California, US, and in Baja California, MX. Many of the occurrence are considered historic; that is they haven't been seen in over 30 years. In fact many haven't been seen in over 80's years, since the 1920's and 1930's. One population that was recorded to be in the bed of the San Diego River is presumed to have gone extinct because it hasn't been seen since 1882!

Phacelia stellaris in the sand. 

Our goal is to retrace the steps of the botanists who have come before us and find Phacelia stellaris at locations where it was historically known in the US. We've started with the easy ones that have been documented since the year 2000.  So far we have seen it at four locations which has given us a better understanding of its habitat requirements.  I truly hope we can find several if not all of the long lost populations of Phacelia stellaris, and perhaps even document a few that we didn't know about before.