Rare Care: Notes from the Field
2021 was a jam-packed and prolific year of rare plant conservation for both Rare Care volunteers and staff. Safety remained a top concern, with care given to evolving COVID-19 protocols, and the wildfire season affecting access to many east side locations. Despite the extra challenges, we successfully completed research fieldwork and rare plant monitoring assignments, and added new collections to the seed vault.
Rare Care and our partners finished up a nine-year effort to census the Wenatchee Mountains checkermallow (Sidalcea oregana var. calva) population at Camas Lands. This has been a really fun project and many volunteers have been involved for almost a decade! Initially it was estimated that there were 11,000 checkermallows at this site. After nine years of flagging, counting, and mapping, we now know there are over 35,000 plants! Monitoring will continue in a more limited basis in the future. (Read more here.)
This July, Wendy Gibble and Anna Carragee collected the first of three seed collections for the Center for Plant Conservation’s ex-situ seed longevity study. The freshly collected pasqueflower (Anemone patens var. multifida) seeds will be compared with a sample of seeds collected from the same population in 2006 and held in the Miller Seed Vault. Thank you to volunteer Josh Wozniak for determining if these seeds were ripe for collection, and thank you to our seed vault volunteers for the quick seed cleaning.
Rare plant monitoring can be an adventure and some sites require quite the effort to access them. Veronica Wisniewski, Edoh Amrian, and Patricia Otto rafted 8.5 miles of the Ronde Grande River in July to monitor several populations of sagebrush mariposa-lily (Calochortus macrocarpus var. maculosus). Robin Fitch kayaked down the Columbia River four times in search of the lowland toothcup (Rotala ramosior). Peter Boley and Leo Egashiro bushwhacked to find prickly tree clubmoss (Dendrolycodium dendroideum) deep in the forest off of Highway 2. This is just a small sampling of the great efforts our rare plant monitoring volunteers go to reach these rare and vulnerable populations.
Collectively our contributions make a big difference for the future of rare native plants in Washington.