Just a few pics from the training week. Sorry that the "curse" of rain was broken. Hopefully the 20% chance of rain early this week will materialize. Can you find the "smugs" in the background? Safe sampling to all of you!

GCT Field Botanist Positions, Summer 2011

Field Botanist Positions, summer 2011, Grand Canyon Trust

Location: Eastern Arizona Strip, Northern Arizona (Kane and Two Mile Ranches)
Start date: Late April/Early May
End date: Mid/Late July
Schedule: This is a full-time temporary, non-benefits eligible position. Crews will work six eight-day field sessions, beginning in early May, with an eight days on (Wed.-Wed.), six days off (Thurs. – Tues.) schedule (10 hrs per day).
Salary: $14-$17/hr, depending on experience, plus per diem.
Application Deadline: February 11,2011

Job Description
GCT is hiring three-five field botanists and one crew leader to assist in data collection for a landscape-scale monitoring project on the eastern Arizona Strip. Duties include: *Identifying plant species
*Collecting ground plot measurements of vegetation and ground cover
*Organizing, storing and backing-up data collected in the field

Minimum Qualifications
*Experience in field identification of plants and experience with field monitoring/research *Strong work ethic, scientific integrity, and a strong sense of responsibility
*Current driver’s license and a good driving record
*Ability to follow data collection protocols
*Ability to work constructively with others
*Ability to hike long distances in challenging terrain in hot weather
*Experience and confidence living and working in primitive outdoor settings

Preferred Qualifications
*Bachelor’s degree in ecology, botany, or closely related field
*Knowledge of mountain and desert flora of the eastern Arizona Strip
*Experience operating 4WD vehicles in rough terrain
*Experience navigating in the backcountry using maps, compass, and GPS
*Wilderness First Responder or First Aid and CPR training
*Experience using plant keys to identify species

For more information on the Kane and Two Mile Ranches project, visit: http://grandcanyontrust.org and click on “Kane and Two Mile Ranches.”
For additional information or to apply, please contact Christine Albano, Kane and Two Mile Ranch Program Manager at 928- 774-7488 or calbano@grandcanyontrust.org.
Applicants: Please include a resume.

Thank you everyone!

Dear all,

You did a wonderful job at the crew training. Thank you for all your enthusiasm, participation, suggestions, and patience. It was a fun week. Look forward to seeing you in the field and our end-of-season meet up!

Ophelia

A sign of days to come?

Today's medium-term forecast for Organ Pipe:

Sunday Night Mostly Clear Lo 38 °F

Monday Sunny Hi 70 °F

Monday Night Mostly Clear Lo 39 °F

Tuesday Sunny Hi 71 °F

Tuesday Night Mostly Clear Lo 41 °F

Wednesday Sunny Hi 71 °F

Full forecast (link)

Julie

I am new to the desert proper though I've worked in arid places in Southern California and portions of Hawaii. I do however have an odd history with deserts in that the first night I camp in one, it always precipitates even if it is not the proper time of year. Consider yourself forewarned.

I started my botany career as a SCA intern at Channel Islands National Park which lucky for me translated into a NPS job at Santa Monica Mountains NRA (mtns behind Malibu). After a brief stint back home in Wisconsin at UW-Madison for a Masters, I was back botanizing on islands, this time in Hawaii.

While I love the flora of HI, I have to admit I was most excited about outrigger canoeing, which I started doing back in CA. The highlight of the year in HI was paddling in the Na Wahine O Ke Kai race from Molokai Island to Oahu Island (I'm 3rd from the front).

A motorized boat containing 4 additional paddlers escorts each canoe, making switches on the go every 20 minutes or so. Despite being a boat of novices, the 42 miles took us just under 7 hours, earning us 35th place out of 82 boats.

Leaving one love for another, I moved to Las Cruces, NM, in Oct where I've been painting our house and getting settled into desert live. I can't wait to meet you all and explore the Sonoran Desert! And don't forget your rain gear this week.

Study Area Map with Zones

Another map of the study area, broken down by zones. Basically, there are 8 zones and each team will be tackling one zone at a time. The tentative schedule is on the Crew Route Logistics spreadsheet.

Natalie Melaschenko

After Karen (one of our co-workers) threatened to write my bio for me, I thought I would beat her to the punch. I grew up in Ontario, Canada and after finishing my undergraduate degree, the first field job I was offered happened to be in New Mexico. Traveling around, I grew to love the Southwest. I've since worked in the Sonoran, the Mojave, the Colorado Plateau and finally in the northern reaches of the Great Basin where I did my Master's research. My graduate work focused on the impacts of cheatgrass on small mammals. After finishing, my partner and I decided we wanted to move back to the Southwest, and we are currently living in Los Alamos, NM (yes, home of the atomic bomb-weird town, but great outdoor access). I tried to find a somewhat humorous photo and ended up with me and Elvis in Vegas (and then reconsidered, but can't figure out how to change it). Looking forward to meeting everyone!

Team Member: Brett Dickson

Greetings fellow Desert Rats! I’m an assistant research professor of wildlife and landscape ecology in the Lab of Landscape Ecology and Conservation Biology at NAU. I also am the Principal Investigator for the SERDP Sonoran Desert project and I’m stoked to have everyone on board! Growing up, I spent a great deal of time in the deserts of California, mostly backpacking and riding bikes. Over the years, my research has included work in numerous arid systems across the West, including the Great Basin in central Nevada, the Mojave in southern California, and now the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. I look forward to a productive and fun field season with you all, and expect to learn a lot from you in the years to come!

Tasya Herskovits

I think I was born a Desert Rat. Though I grew up in NYC and NJ, as soon as I turned 18 I scurried out West as fast as my little rat legs could carry me. I lived in northern New Mexico for about 6 years, and I thought that was the desert. Then I discovered the Sonoran and realized what a real desert is. Apparently, the Sonoran wasn’t dry enough for me, and after a brief hiatus in Oregon and central America, I gravitated towards the Mojave desert of southern California. If this pattern of graduating to harsher and harsher deserts continues, I will probably end up in Death Valley and then . . . Sahara, Serengeti . . . ?

I got hooked on botany while studying plant medicine with Michael Moore in Bisbee, AZ, suddenly realizing that observing each plant in detail, down to the hairs, was strangely captivating. For me botany is a way to get very, very up close and personal with the plants that inspire me with their wide range ingenious ways of surviving in the harshest of climates.

I also enjoy native plant landscaping and educating people about the flora in their backyard, encouraging people to keep their natives instead of scraping them away. I love watching people’s jaws drop when they learn that their pokey Yucca that’s in the way of the patio they want to build may actually be over 800 years old.

This past year I interned on the Veg Crew at Joshua Tree National Park, and we got to work on all kinds of interesting projects, my favorite of which is the Flora Project, the first detailed mapping and cataloguing of all found species in JTNP.

My main other passion is dancing, any kind of dancing, anytime, anywhere, and to almost any kind of music, though I especially love middle-eastern, Indian, hip-hop, funk, and gypsy (music that combines two or more of these gets extra points).

Little known fact: I like the Sonoran better than the Mojave, but don’t tell my friends at JTNP.

I am really looking forward to converging with all of you fabulous people in the desert to listen and learn what nature has to tell us. I LOVE meeting botanists and plant people as I sometimes feel we are few and far between . . .and I can’t wait to learn and share more!

See ya amongst the Saguaros . . . .

Just sayin'

We all suspected as much.

Sarah K.

I grew up in the midwest, but am in love with the desert. I have worked in the Great Basin as well as the Mojave, and am ever so excited to see what the Sonoran has to offer. I have an innate love of plants and am fascinated with desert species. I like hula hooping, my favorite color is pink, and I enjoy eating avocados, a lot. My favorite home has always been my tent and a desert sunset just isn't the same without a Tecate in hand.

Team Member: Steven Sesnie

Currently, I am a research professor at NAU. I have been a desert rat since 1985 when I led an expedition of several thousand individuals into the Grand Canyon, along the Bright Angel trail. At least, I felt like I was leading thousands of individuals down the trail. Since that time I've been exploring deserts from northern Mexico to Peru as a recreational pursuit. I have primarily been focused on studying tropical and tropical forest ecology since 1992 in the southwestern US and Central and South America. The Sonoran Desert Research Program is a new undertaking with NAU and other research partners, where I hope to deepen my understanding of southwestern desert ecosystems and contribute novel methods and approaches to biodiversity conservation in these systems. I greatly look forward to meeting the many new members of our research team and sharing this tremendous opportunity with all of you!

A Taste of the Desert

This Newsletter on Organ Pipe's website should give you a taste of the desert, even if it is about 6 years old. I especially like the section called, "How do you say that word?"

http://www.nps.gov/orpi/parknews/upload/newspaper2005.pdf

Study Area

By now Luke probably told most of you that we will start at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI). This is just one of many land units that we will be visiting this spring and we are working hard to finalize study permits and logistics. I thought it would be helpful to share with you the study area boundaries and the potential land owners we will be working with. Here is a map showing the study area boundary in black and the diversity of potential land owners in different colors. The map is zoomed in to central and southwestern AZ. We will not be working on private lands but all other lands are potential sites for plots (pending research approval in some cases). ORPI, our starting location, is shown in turquoise.

Touching briefly on the methods and science behind this project

For those of you wondering what the plots might look like, here is one from the fall sampling. Click on the photo to get a larger version in which you can see the plot boundary (large square) and subplot boundaries (small squares). Point sampling is performed where the yellow lines (transects) intersect subplot boundaries or other transects. Thus, there are 25 point intercepts per subplot. The subplots are 30m by 30m (the size of a Landsat TM pixel). The plots are 250m by 250m (the size of a MODIS pixel). These satellite sensors are considered moderate resolution and you can see from the image that there is a lot of spatial heterogeneity at a scale smaller than what either a Landsat TM or MODIS TM pixel can see. Here is a photo taken at the furthest right subplot in the image above to give you a sense of the community structure and diversity:

For comparison, I've included a crude map showing what the same place on the ground looks like in a single Landsat TM image below. The outline of a single MODIS pixel is shown in black.

There are two hypotheses being tested. The first hypothesis is that invaded pixels have a different spectral signature. Landsat TM has 6 reflective bands, so each pixel can be described by a set of 6 values. One of the more famous derivatives of Landsat data (and many other satellite imagery) is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI. NDVI utilizes the fact that vegetation has strong absorption in the red wavelength due to chlorophyll activity while and highly reflective in the near-infrared wavelengths due to cell structures. These characteristics are unique to vegetation, so NDVI is used to quantify the amount or health of vegetation. NDVI utilizes two of the six Landsat TM bands, so ostensibly, more information can be obtained from the full set of Landsat bands. Of course, the spectral "signature" of vegetation and other materials change over the course of season due to factors such as green-up and senescence, the wetting and drying of soils, and the presence of snow. Therefore, we seek to find an optimal timing in which invaded pixels are distinguishable from uninvaded pixels.

The second hypothesis is that the phenology of invasive species in the desert differ from native species. This has been demonstrated already for many species, including cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), and one of our study species, Sahara mustard (Brassica tournefortii). The premise is that these species are more aggressive in their water usage, green up earlier, and senesce earlier. Additional evidence suggests that invasive grasses mute bimodal growing seasons.

What makes our approach viable is the incorporation of long time series of these satellite images. Shown below is a time series of MODIS NDVI over the course of 10 years. The goal is to match unique phenological signals in the time series with invasive species and biomass estimates gained in the field this spring and develop models that predict invasive species occurrence, abundance, and biomass at other locations.

Team Member: Aaryn Olsson

I am a desert rat. I have been intimate with glochids and retrorsely barbed spines many more times than I can remember. I know the thrill of seeing the broken tip of an embedded agave thorn surface weeks after it first entered my skin. I can weave through a patch of chainfruit cholla at the same pace that most people walk along a sidewalk. My contortions of navigating a cluster of jumping cholla could be used to train pole vaulters and high jumpers. I have broken icicles off saguaros and gathered snow from prickly pears to make desert snowballs. I have waited for Gila Monsters to cross my path and given sidewinders a wide berth. I listen to thunder and then I yell back. I have chewed on Ephedra and drunk from tinajas. I kissed a Canyon tree frog and it didn't turn into a prince (or a princess). I part the slime in canyon pools. I picked up a Colorado River toad and didn't get warts. My favorite smell is creosote right before it rains. I run through puddles and I always root for desert rain. I love flash floods and eat wild greens. I have a love-hate relationship with Kearney and Peebles. So will you. Yes, I have hugged a saguaro.

I grew up in Tucson, AZ, and received degrees from the University of Arizona, the last being a PhD in Arid Lands Resource Sciences. I started work at the NAU Lab of Landscape Ecology and Conservation Biology in June, 2010. I am a desert ecologist and remote sensing specialist with a strong interest in invasive species and the "grass-fire cycle". The grass-fire cycle, as termed by Carla D'Antonio and Peter Vitousek (1992), describes a positive feedback between invasive grasses in arid ecosystems that have historically experienced infrequent fires or no fires at all. Arid ecosystems are typically characterized by little to no fine fuel connectivity and are resistant to fire. Invasive grasses fill the interstitial spaces and allow a fire cycle that destroys natives and promotes further invasion by grasses. This is happening in my own backyard.

I now live in Flagstaff with my wife and son. We are expecting #2 in March and as a result I will not be in the field for the duration. When the day comes, I hope you will drink a Tecate for our little one.