The summer shifts at ABMI are mostly focused on plants, since
most prairie plants go into flower later in summer (July-ish?). As a plant
technologist, my job is to identify and/or collect as many plants as I can at
each of our sites! It’s been an amazing learning experience, and I’ve
definitely become a much much much better botanist than I was before summer. Although
I had a bunch of help with the boreal plants from my wonderful supervisor, most
of the prairie work has been independent, so I’ve gotten very intimate
with all my plant books (the Common Plants of the Western Rangelands series, put out by the Government of Alberta, is my favourite go-to field guide, although the paper covers and first few pages have long since fallen off...).
The first few days of shift were in the Rocky Mountain House
area, which I hadn’t really worked in before, so there were lots of new and exciting plants to learn!
I definitely liked the shrubs the most. Fun species I found in the boreal:
- · Raspberry (Rubus idaeus)
- · Lowbush cranberry (Viburnum edule)
- · Spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium)
- · Baneberry (Actaea rubra)
- · Blueberry (Vaccinium myrtilloides)
- · Saskatoon berry (Amelanchier alnifolia)
- · Strawberry (Fragaria virginiana AND vesca)
- · Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)
- · Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea)
- · Lots of gooseberries (Ribes hudsonianum, lacustre and oxyacanthoides)
- · Twinflower (Linnaea borealis)
- · Spotted coral-root (Corallorhiza maculata)
As you can probably tell, I really like berries…
But as
lovely and buggy as forest sites, are, it’s the prairie sites that I was really gunning for. We had a bunch of sites on the Suffield military base which I
probably can’t say much about, except that there were a very concerning amount
of weeds and disturbance species around. All of the tank and truck trails were just covered in crested wheatgrass and yellow sweet clover, yuck! But one site there was just amazing, it was
super sandy and apparently very undervisited because there were barely
any disturbance species or invasives. Just lots of fun fun sandy species! Here
are some that I have only found at that site and one or two other sandy-soil
sites:
- · Indian rice grass (Oryzopsis hymenoides)
- · Dropseed (Sporobulus heterolepis)
- · Sand reedgrass (Calamovilfa longifolia)
- · White evening primrose (Oenothera pallida)
- · Chamaerhodos (Chamaerhodos erecta)
- · Scurf pea (Psoralea esculenta)
- · Indian bread-root (Psoralidium lanceolatum)
- · Ground plum (Astragalus crassicarpa)
- · Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea)
- · White prairie clover (Dalea candida)
- · Drummond’s milkvetch (Astragalus drummondii)
- · White beardtongue (Penstemon albidus)
Sandy species are a bucket of fun :) We had another interesting site only a few kilometers from the Montana
border, and also within easy view of the Canadian rocky mountains. More fun plants to be found there:
- · Shortawn foxtail (Alopecurus aequalis)
- · So many astragaluses! Agrestis, crassicarpus, drummondii, flexuosus, pectinatus, and one that I couldn’t ID
- · One-spike AND California oatgrasses (Danthonia unispicata and californica)
- · Alum root (Heuchera parvifolia)
- · Fernleaf biscuitroot (Lomatium dissectum)
- · False gromwell (Onosmodium molle)
- · Owl-clover (Orthocarpus luteus)
- · Sticky locoweed (Oxytropis borealis)
- · Woolly groundsel (Packera cana)
- · Scouler’s popcornflower (Plagiobothrys scouleri)
That one was probably my most diverse prairie site so far
with 80 species J So it's been a fantastic two shifts of botanizing around the boreal and the prairies, keying out milkvetches and grasses to my heart's content. Kind of bummed that there are only two more days of surveying left... And I don't even have any good photos to show for it except for a cool elk skull that my partner found:
 |
| Elk! |
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