I Can See the Finish Line!

My study plant, Cordylanthus palmatus (with salt crystals on its leaves)

After much debate, my thesis will be on the germination of one species (not two or three, as previously thought): Cordylanthus palmatus (palmate-bracted bird's beak). It's a hemi-parasitic plant that grows on the edges of seasonal pools in the alkaline/saline grasslands of the Great Central Valley, CA (it's a mouthful, I know).


C. palmatus seedling (little, light green guy), growing alongside its potential host, salt grass (Distichlis spicata)

And here's the really big news: I think I might actually graduate soon! After a big meeting with my thesis committee a few months ago, I now have a time line and a date: July 22nd! Eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!


A seasonal wetland pool at my study site in Woodland, CA.

Yes, you read correctly. Eek. The finished product isn't due to the Office of Graduate Studies until September 8th, but my deadline for the first draft (which must be as ready-to-go as possible) is July 22nd. After that date I am going to Greece for two weeks and my advisors get to tear my thesis to shreds.


Bird's beak seedlings in the greenhouse

So the next two months are going to be jammed-packed with work. But I'll be around, everyone needs a break. In fact, I'm spending the next four days in Napa visiting Jaja and getting work done in the quiet house on Inglewood Ave (I swear).


Seedlings in April

These photos were taken on my last couple of trips out to my study site (April and May). The plants are just seedlings now, they grow all summer and flower in the fall.


Big, flowering plants in the greenhouse

Wish me luck!


The palmately lobed floral bracts and beak-shaped flowers that give this plant its common name

Re-Searching

I visited my site again last week to collect Atriplex joaquiniana seed. I had to do it incredibly early in the morning in order to avoid the heat, the sun, and the tiny little black flies that threaten to drive me insane.

Here is a picture of A. joaquiniana:



It's a very unique-looking plant, if not that attractive. The whole thing is covered with fruit, so it looks like it has none on it, but that's only because the fruits grow so densely on the stem that they create an almost smooth surface. But if you start to pick at it with your fingernails you realize that it is filled with small black seeds.

Some other species that grow on my site:


an invasive grass that forms little starbursts


The same grass, growing with Frankenia salina, an annual alkali wetland plant

And here are my little Cordylanthus seedlings growing under 15 degrees Celsius. Cute little buggers.

Loving Lassen, again

a field of lupines next to Lake Helen

Last weekend I visited my friend Sarah, who's spending the summer up at Lassen Volcanic National Park doing the field work for her research. She just recently decided to switch from a master's to a PhD (Congratulations Sarah!) so I think I will have many more opportunities to go up and visit her in the future.


A dense aspen grove

It was during an ungodly 100 degree weekend, so it was with excitement that I packed my fleece, knit hat, gloves, and picnic cooler to start the three hour drive up to the volcano on Saturday morning.


A view of Lassen peak

Sarah is an amazing tour guide, and we packed a lot of stuff into essentially a day and a half trip. We went to Manzanita Lake and had a swim and quiet contemplation on the banks (do you call the side of a lake the bank?).


Manzanita Lake

Sarah cooked a wonderful dinner Saturday night and then led a moonlit hike (it was just days away from the full moon) to "Bumpass Hell" the geothermal area of the park. I have no pictures for you because it was too dark, but it was really an amazing sensory experience. We walked the 3 mile round trip with our headlamps off the whole time, using the moonlight to guide us. I was told that the color of the water is a brilliant aqua, but because of the night-time nature of the hike it was really the sounds of the area that we got to appreciate. The glooop blooops of the mudpots, the loud constant hiss of the steam vents, the trickling of hot water running down the hillside. It was really primeval, enhanced by the fact that we were walking around on a boardwalk that had no handrails. It made me feel very exposed, we could get right up to the mudpots and kneel next to them, listening to the hot air force its way through the mud, bloop blooping all the way up (it's really the best onomatopoeia for what it actually sounds like).


The "bank" of the lake

On Sunday Sarah took me to one of her research sites (she's studying aspen). We hiked around it, mapping the aspen stands, wading through creeks, and climbing over underbrush. It was really quite exhausting, to tell the truth.


aspen grove

Finally, Sarah showed me some of the popular sites of the park, like Lake Helen and Kings Creek Meadow where we saw an amazing amount of wildflowers.


Lake Helen


Castilleja sp.


wildflowers at Kings Creek Meadow


Thanks Sarah!

Researchin' the day away

I finally got to visit one of the sites for my study, the Alkali Grassland Preserve in Woodland, CA (ironic town name, as you can see). Here are some pictures that I took myself of Cordylanthus palmatus. This time I don't have to worry about getting permission to post the pics.







We went early in the morning (the PhD student, Tracy, and I) in order to beat the heat and the blackflies. We checked on some experiments that Tracy is working on and I wandered around, going "what's this?" "what's this?" every five minutes. Some of the plants out there I recognized, especially Salicornia, pickleweed. I love this plant, it looks like seaweed growing on land, or knobby little gnome fingers.



We also took some samples of three different Atriplex species, hoping that one of them would be the ever elusive Atriplex joaquiniana, one of the rare plants that I'm supposed to include in the second half of my study. One of the plants we collected was kind of weedy in the site, and I had already shown it to my professor who said it wasn't A. joaquiniana, but we took it anyway. I brought the three plants to the herbarium at Davis and the curator there, Ellen, wonderfully offered to press them and show them to the California annual Atriplex guy, Robert Preston. I just went by there today to see what he had to say, and there are not one, but TWO RARE ATRIPLEX on my site!!! This is big people. Very exciting. Apparently the one that is weedy actually is A. joaquiniana, and a smaller one I collected is A. depressa. Wahoo! This means that my master's research will not be on only one plant, but at least two, if not three. I am sighing with relief.



Things are coming along with my research otherwise as well. Of course there is the requisite stress in between, but things are rolling now, so as long as I continue to make myself massive to-do lists, things will be aaaaaaall right.

Big News, part 2

This post has been a long time coming (and it's heavy on words today, sorry). I officially have a topic for my master's research! It's been a frustrating process because I did this graduate school thing kind of backwards. What usually happens is a person talks to professors at various schools whose interests match their own, and she finds a project she can join where they have the space and money to support her. Then she applies to the school and that professor vouches for her and proves that he has the resources to pay her tuition etc etc. I, on the other hand, just applied to schools like it was a regular college, not knowing any better. It does make me proud that I got in without anyone vouching for me, but still, it leaves me kind of lost when it comes to support and research opportunities. I've had to figure this all out on my own, and sometimes it feels like I'm just floundering around and drowning, grasping at tree limbs and whatnot as I sink.

But now I have a project! This is big. I'm just realizing how exciting this project is too, because I was so focused on the fact that I actually had one to care much about what it was. So without further ado, here is the tentative title of my project:

Germination of rare and endangered plants in the alkali grassland ecosystem.

Tada! So, some explanation is required. The alkali grassland is an ecosystem that is characterized by highly alkaline and saline soils. It has seasonal wetland pools that inundate plants in the winter wet season, then dry up and experience drought in the summer dry season (this is like the vernal pools I wrote about a while ago). Plants have to be pretty tough to grow in the wetland areas of the grassland, and they need to have adaptations that allow them to live there. This means that there are a lot of endemic plants there, plants that only grow in those ecosystems and nowhere else.

My project will examine the germination of three rare plants in this ecosystem. Basically, what triggers they need to sprout from seeds, and how I can manipulate conditions to get the best germination rates from the small amount of seed available. There's practically no research on the germination requirements of any of the plants I'm studying, so my research will surely get published. This is a big deal. I'm only a master's student, but I will be the principal author in a paper that will most likely be published in an actual journal. Holy crap.

The other reason that I'm excited about the project is that the plants I will be studying are really quite cool. The one I will be focusing on the most is called Cordylanthus palmatus, and it's a hemi-parasite (it doesn't depend on its host for support, but it parasitizes in order to increase its fitness). It also has little salt glands that take up salt and extrude it onto the surface of its leaves, giving it a crystallized appearance.



Better photos can be found on the CalPhotos website, but I don't feel like asking permission to use the photos, so if you're interested, you can go see them using the link above.

Another plant I will be studying is Astragalus tener var. tener. It's a cute little pea. More pictures here.


photo from the Great Valley grasslands State Park, via the CNPS website

And finally, if I can find this one in my site, I will be studying Atriplex joaquiniana, an incredibly rare salt-bush. This photo is also from CalPhotos, but it has different copyright rules.


copyright 2003 George W. Hartwell

Sierra foothills serpentine geology

A few weeks ago (5/12) I went on a final field trip for my CA Floristics class to a serpentine geology site in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. We went at the perfect time because all of the little wildflowers were blooming and carpeting the site.





Serpentine is a type of rock that came from the mantle of the Earth, and it was scraped up onto California from the bottom of the ocean when the continent was still forming. The only other place in the US it exists is on the east coast in PA and a few spots south of there. It's full of heavy metals and the plants that grow on it have to be able to deal with abnormally high amounts of certain elements like magnesium and nickel, and low amounts of essential elements like potassium and phosphorous. Serpentine rocks are always tinged a bit turquoise and have gorgeous stripes of grays and reds in them.



The trees and shrubs that grow on serpentine are always stunted and grow more sparsely than elsewhere.



In some areas, the rocks sticking out made it look a little bit like a moonscape.




The tiny wildflowers in combination with the beautiful rocks made nice little still-lifes:





In other news, I just got back from my last field trip of the quarter, a three day trip to the Sierra Nevadas. Now, only three more weeks until "Schooooooooool's Out. For. Summer!"

The Payne Ranch, Colusa County, California

Yesterday I went on a plant collecting trip with my CA Floristics class. It's part of an optional two credit project that a bunch of us are taking in addition to the regular class. We spent about 7 hours walking through the 15,000 acres of BLM land that is The Payne Ranch.


We only walked about 3.5 miles in that time because we're plant people and every five steps we need to stop and say "Hey, isn't that in the Ericaceae family?" or something equally nerdy. Also, we were collecting plants for our projects so we had to take down information on data sheets every time we collected something. At the end of the day we pressed the plants in a plant press and they will be dried in the presses and then mounted as herbarium specimens. Basically that means that they will be glued and taped onto pieces of paper and identified with a label, then filed in the Herbarium, which is a huge reference library full of pressed plants. Sweet.


The day was wonderful for so many reasons. I can't really stress enough how nice it is to go on hikes with people who care about plants as much as I do. It's very satisfying. As we walked through the ranch we passed through grasslands, oak woodlands, and riparian areas.




We even saw serpentine soils, which are full of heavy metals and have very interesting, often stunted vegetation. Or none at all like in the hillside below.


Part of the project is identifying the plants we collected, so I don't actually have any names for some of the pictures I'm showing.

Delphinium sp., Ranunculaceae

Chick lupine, Lupinus microcarpus, Fabaceae

Unknown flower (for now)

The BLM leases the land to ranchers to herd their cattle and we definitely had some company while we were there. We actually got to see some cowboys (and a cowgirl) herding cattle up over a ridge. I took a video with my camera and I'm going to post it on Youtube soon, because I have no idea how I would put a movie up on this blog.


Besides the cows we saw a rattle snake, two garter snakes, a baby jackrabbit, many lizards, and a few frogs. California is awesome.




I also took a lot of pictures of gorgeous lichen-covered rocks and I will post them soon. They range in color from fire orange to turquoise to creamy white, wait until you see them, oh man they're beautiful.