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Articles Search for a Rare Wearing waterproofed hiking boots and hauling a backpack heavy with measuring tapes, field data sheets, flagging tape, sunscreen, water and your lunch, you walk along a barbed wire fence and into an open, sunny meadow traversed by narrow, meandering waterways. You've just spent an hour in a van with six other people, first traveling east along the scenic Columbia River Gorge, then north over bumpy, gravel roads in Washington. It's a hot July day and before long you seek relief and drink from your water bottle, glad that you brought it along in spite of its weight. The icy water tastes good while you hike through the meadow, avoiding piles of elk and cow droppings and swatting at an occasional fly. Soon your team leader sights a barely opened, pale blue flower hiding within the tall grass. You hang your pack on the fence to keep it dry and pull out a clipboard with its water-resistant data sheets and a pencil.
Picture yourself as a volunteer helping The Berry Botanic Garden and the U.S. Forest Service to perform rare plant research as part of their cooperative "Partners for Plants Program." You are near Mt. Adams in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and have just found a population of one of the Forest's rarest plants: the pale blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium sarmentosum.
This small, native plant is, despite its misleading common name, an iris. It has tiny pale blue, white or blue-violet flowers and prefers to grow in wet meadows in Washington and Oregon, usually between 1600 and 4000 feet in elevation. It is threatened by cattle and sheep grazing, and human activities that alter hydrology such as timber harvest and road building.
Volunteers in the "Partners" program spend a week in June or July working on projects involving rare plants in their wild habitats. In past years, projects have included searching for small, carnivorous plants in bogs; working in old growth forests studying the fringed pinesap, a plant appearing more like a mushroom than a plant; or searching for golden chinquapin trees, hosts for a rare butterfly.
This summer, over two dozen volunteers and students will monitor the pale blue-eyed grass as one of several projects. This is our second year on the Sisyrinchium sarmentosum project. Volunteers will again establish plots and count plants. The experience affords volunteers the opportunity to experience rare plant research firsthand.
During each week, volunteers live on the Gifford Pinchot Forest in comfortable but rustic conditions. Housing, complete with hot showers, is provided by the Forest Service. Each week begins with an orientation during which volunteers receive training necessary for performing research in remote wilderness areas, including information on forest safety and compass use. Days in the field can be long. We fix our own lunches and all share in the preparation of meals. Each evening, tired after a long day, volunteers are treated to a presentation by Forest Service personnel, including fisheries biologists, archeologists, botanists, nursery managers and timber estimators. The evening talks provide unique insights into the reality of management philosophies and decisions, and are often followed by lively discussions.
Students also participate in this program and obtain undergraduate or graduate credit by enrolling with Portland State University through a course entitled "Native Plant Diversity." Students perform the same research as volunteers, attend all presentations and are required to answer a series of essay questions during their week in the program. Graduate students also write a short paper which is due roughly one month after the course is over.
At the end of the summer, my job is to write and submit a report to the Forest Service summarizing the results of the year's research. Although the data collection can be tedious and might seem insignificant, two weeks of work by so many people really add up to impressive results. Information we glean from monitoring rare plant populations helps us to better understand each species' role in the bigger picture and will ultimately be used by land managers to protect the forest.
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