Asters, Poas, and Thistles, OH MY!

This week a lot of time has been spent on learning plant identification. Part of my job here is to do "rapid assessment" vegetation surveys, in which I determine the cover of native and invasive plants, and also have to determine which species on a list of about 60 are present in the transect. I did work similar to this in Grasslands National Park, where we had to know how to ID over 200 plant species, but we had two highly trained botanists teaching us all how to ID the plants, and we spent a couple weeks each summer learning the plants. Here, the story has not been similar.

Alli looking at some unknown grass species.

One difference is that we only have to know how to ID the 60 species on the list, which is far less than what we had to know in Saskatchewan. But, we also have to know whether every other species we encounter is native or invasive, so really we have to know all the species in my opinion. Last week on Thursday and Friday, Marissa came to show us how to run the transects and use the "classification tree" to fill out the codes on the datasheet. She showed us a few plants that we had to know, but no nearly all of them (plus, she had Lexi in tow, so it was hard to really move around a lot looking for different plants). We were then set loose for a few days to try doing transects on our own.

Brittany and Meredith discussing plant ID

The crew looking at various plants

 On Wednesday, Rhett from the TNC Bluestem office, came for a day of intensive training. In the morning, we learned about different terms for plants, like opposite and alternate, palmate, pinnate, raceme, etc. We learned how to tell different families apart, like the asters from the peas. A lot was, however, focused on flowers, while many of the flowers in the prairie aren't out just yet. Even the protocol for the "rapid assessment" states that the surveys don't start until July! So why we're doing them in mid-June is beyond my understanding.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum), a native

After the morning of powerpoints, which were actually really useful and interesting, we went into the prairie looking for various plants species. Rhett is a big grass and sedge guy, so unfortunately we focused a lot on those for the first few hours, even though we don't need to know how to ID sedges because they're pretty much all native. We did get some really good tips on grass ID, which is important because it can be hard to tell grasses apart, and some are native while others are invasive. So, Wednesday was a pretty good day for learning new plant species, but I still don't know all of the ones on our "indicator" list. There are four different blazing stars, four different thistles, and probably a hundred asters (although not all the asters are on the list). We didn't really see many of those.

Some kind of wild sunflower.

Another annoying thing is that the protocol we're using is a little bit odd. It talks about native and invasives, but unfortunately these two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can have a native plant that starts to take over, making it an invasive, and you can have a non-native plant that doesn't take over, which means it is not invasive. So that confounds the protocol. Second, we're doing cover, which is always hard, but we're also supposed to ignore woody cover up to a certain point. Yeesh. I've done about 5 transects on my own now, each taking about an hour to complete, and running into these various problems has been annoying.

Dame's Rocket (Hespersis matronalis), an invasive

Somehow these veg transects are going to get done, they may not be exactly right but I think that is ok since they're supposed to be "rapid assessment" anyway. I'm also still working through the point counts, I'm half way done now. Still have two days left for round 3, and the there are rounds 4 and 5 to go. Field work is never perfect, even with the point counts I realized I may have been missing Upland Sandpipers because they make a noise I hadn't recognized before round 3. It just goes with the territory I suppose!

Lady's slipper, a very nice native that probably won't be in any of our plots.

I'm thinking of visiting Winnipeg next weekend, hopefully between rounds of counts, as a sort of vacation. I might need it after a week of early morning point counts and afternoon veg transects!

Tall cinquefoil, a native species on the indicator list.

That's my shadow at about 7am, after I'd been out since 5am!
Don't worry, I didn't have to walk through that water.