They have beautiful purple veins in the cream petals.
Posted on 01/04/2003 1:26:35 PM PST by farmfriend
Ecologist to lead BLM effort to restore Great Basin
By Karl Horeis, Appeal staff writer
Mike Pellant, a rangeland ecologist from Boise, Idaho, will head the Bureau of Land Management's effort to restore ecological health to the Great Basin -- an area which includes five states.
"Mike is one of the smartest guys I know, when it comes to rangeland," said John Singlaub, manager of BLM's Carson City field office. "I've known him for years. He's got some great ideas on how we can do things better both in the Great Basin and throughout the West."
The BLM effort, formally called the "Great Basin Restoration Initiative," is aimed largely at slowing the expansion of invasive weed species, such as cheat grass. The initiative will target all Great Basin areas, including land in Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Oregon and California.
Pellant, who has worked for BLM since 1976 in rangeland conservation and rehabilitation, was appointed to the post by the BLM's Nevada State Director Bob Abbey.
"We can't eliminate the invasive species," Pellant said. "But we can develop strategies to maintain land that is healthy and restore degraded land. We need to reduce the ecological and economic consequences of these disturbances."
According to BLM, the ecological health of the Great Basin has deteriorated at an alarming rate over the last 30 years as weed species from outside the United States have come to dominate some 25 million acres.
"Some research says that we may be losing up to 4,000 acres a day to invasive species," Pellant said.
Singlaub of the Carson City BLM office refers to the expansion of weeds as "an explosion in slow motion."
"The weeds that we're seeing expand throughout the West -- more exotics -- they're a serious problem."
Part of the problem is that cheat grass dries early, burns readily, and carries fire. Singlaub said the wildfires of 1999 and 2000 were so devastating to the Great Basin that reseeding efforts depleted national seed supplies.
"We used up every native seed that was available in the United States," he said.
He described the situation in one area that was hit especially hard, the Birds of River area along the Snake River in Idaho. There, cheat grass has replaced original shrubbery, leaving no place for small rodents too hide from raptors. After the rodents were all consumed, the birds were left with no food.
"From our perspective, it's reached crises point," Singlaub said. "And that's another good reason to bring Mike on board."
Pellant has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's degree in range science from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He is the co-author of more than 20 restoration-related publications and is an adjunct faculty member at Boise State University. He will direct the project from BLM's state office in Boise, to Singlaub's dismay.
"I wish we could get him up here to Nevada, but I guess this is the best we can do," he said.
ON THE NET
Western Great Basin Coordination Center:
http://www.nv.blm.gov/wgbcc/
Why didn't he say 40,000 or 400,000 acres per day. 99.9% of the people in America will believe him without any question whatsoever. Give him a few months in office and he'll get Agenda 21 going strong.
You and I both know that the solution will be cutting grazing. It won't work and will be the wrong move but they will do it anyway.
You and I both know that, however my friend, you may just have forgotten the cost rising factor of The re-introduction of the Gray Wolf Program". How in the hell do you run sheep when wolves kill them faster than you can buy them? Cattle operations have these cute little defenseless guys, calves. Oops, now will the Feds will provide armed guards or will they run a crew to move the pens and lock the cattle up at night? Carry, the cheapest method has now become impractical, hasn't it?
In fact, I don't "know" that. Who knows, the agency may be in need of a new fad. There may be some opportunities here to erode the civc monopoly as a contractor and alienate the agencies from the activist thugs all in one swell foop. There is a growing academic undercurrent that is recognizing some of the principles I advocate and has "discovered" the role grazing plays in maintaining intact landscapes of native vegetation.
In a way, I don't care how "impractical" the application appears as long as we are nudging the system in the right direction and keeping cattlemen and shepherds in business. perhaps the weed control contract will pay for the depredation?
Yes, that would help. The ecologist the BLM hired to do this work is a political scientist and doesn't want to fix the problem. Mr.Pellant is a botanical xenophobe and anything he devises will be a failure.
As a plantsman I embrace plant diversity. I reject the notion that all exotics are bad. Quite the contrary.
I agree with you Mr. Carry Okie, when you stated in your book: "The very idea that bio-diverse natives are somehow more suited to local habitat, and will ultimately return to dominance without human redress is, simply false." Plant material -seeds, cuttings, fruits- moves as readily as humans do, human plant collecting, like the invention of agriculture, predates history itself.
As a plantsman I'm concerned about releasing an exotic like Himalayan blackberry, kudzu, or tamarisk into the lansdscape. However, there is at least one ecologist that has a computer model or what we call the "decision tree" based on a plant's observed characteristics, which asks questions about how quickly the species reproduces and whether it belongs to a family or genus already strongly invasive in North America, that indicates whether a plant is likely to become invasive. This is how I identify plant material I release for commercial distribution.
As a plantsman I believe in the words of William Bartram, who explored America in the late 18th century, when it was still a vast unexplored land, "Let us advance to the spot in which nature has seated them," Bartram wrote of the plants he sought.
Seed collecting and hybridization is also a means of genetic diversity in the face of widespread environmental degredation. In Nepal, for instance, a grazing yak-cow hybred, the Dzo, has had a serious inpact on alpine plant communities. In China, deforestation is proceeding at a rate that far outstrips the ability of Chi-Con and foreign botanists to inventory and collect seeds from endangered species.
So IMHO policies that will emanate from the desk of Dr. Pellant under the guise of environmental science will be a monumentous waste of resources and will result in yet more draconian land use restrictions.
Your considerations re whether to import and distribute exotic materials seem appropriate, but I would caution you that under my model you had best be prepared to fund the risk of unintended consequences. Take rhododendrons for example, a plant species indigenous to California. Is it appropriate to crossbreed indigenous stock in the wild? If not, how then do you control the pollen from cultivars if there were adverse consequences? Would you be accountable for what your customers do with the product? No? then who would be?
This is more important and representative than you might think. One would normally expect that imported rhododendrons would be little threat to other local species. There is more than one specialist that has fingered imported rhododendrons as the source of the phytophthora that is killing massive numbers of Western deciduous trees. Could a plant importer be accountable for that settlement? I doubt it.
As a result, I would expect it to be cheaper to import sterile material and perform the micropropagation here instead of paying for the risk of inadvertant infestation. If that cost isn't worth it, then it's a bad business decision to import the plant.
Now, it might be worth importing a gene that would make domestic plants resistant to a pathogen, but one would have to be rather circumspect in that regard too.
You see, I'm no purist when it comes to indigenous species; I just want people to be accountable for the consequences of what they do. I have neighbors who love eucalyptus. When they tease me about my expected disapproval I tell them that I have no objection to the tree, I would simply like them to set up a trust fund such that if it burns the seedlings a quarter mile away can be controlled for as long as the seed bank remains viable. I have just such a consequence on the end of my property and it is a five acre mess.
You are correct that people have been moving plant material all over the world for centuries. I would argue that such lack of discrimination has seriously degraded land productivity here in the US compared to what it could have been. We have yet to confront in California just how much water starthistle consumes. I would REALLY like to be able to hold my neighbors accountable for their Italian thistles. I'm getting damned tired of climbing vertical slopes on a rope to get them.
I am thus VERY cautious when it comes to variance on my own flora and think it useful to identify how they cohabit. I might as well be a purist in that regard but it's for my own interests. For example, I have found that two species very commonly found after disturbance, mimulus and eriodictyon, play a key role in protecting other bushes and trees from predation by deer and forces trees into developing a vertical stem.
The cost of reversal of an error is so enormous that the systems we have in place are laughably insufficient.
BTW, I hope you found the book worth the investment.
I have quit giving people the benefit of the doubt. I didn't buy your book until I read your website. I will not give Mike Pellant the benefit of the doubt, especially when the reccomendation comes from John Singlaub! Singlaub hasn't done squat for the ranchers of Nevada. Fire consumed a record 1.6 million acres in Nevada last year, a large part of the land under his command. Quite a hero for the BLM.
What could the Grange do to advance this cause?
We live in cedar breaks SE of Pueblo.It is a mix of Rocky Mt.juniper,pinyon,and Gambel oak plus gramma and other native grasses Some of the(beetle and drought proof) cliffside junipers are ancient--perhaps a thousand years old.These oldies grow like bristle cone pines ie branches persist long after other parts are dead.
Our 360 acre retirement spot backs up to several huge old cattle spreads(two over 90,000 ac. plus several 10,000 ac)Everyone's cows were sold last May/June --arguably the worst drought in 325 years per FDA tree ring studies.Some big ranches were using Savory range management methods with good results until the rain stopped.
I figured out we had beetle attack at the eleventh hour and sprayed(Sevin)around the house saving only a few fine old pinyons.The fed and state experts were'nt much help--I apparently alerted them to the beetle situation.Sevin is marginal effectiveness but apparently only thing available anymore(would have paid a thousand bucks for fifty gallons of 1950's DDT).
Am looking for alternate beetle resistant trees to plant in the thin limestone soil on the breaks near the house.We just got back from a three week tour of Spain.Would any variety of olive trees survive here at just under 6000 ft? Some groves seen in Southern Spain were at about 4000' and thriving on similiar soil and scant rainfall.
Colorado olives---now that would be something!
I collect too, but only from the immediate area. This year it was zauschneria. I don’t have any on the property but I found some down the road. I’m late putting them in, but we’ll see. I have some absolutely awesome native iris macrosiphon (if you are interested). I transplanted over 100 of them this year. They are indestructible: just dig out a wad, divide them, and plant; they require no water at all, even in a drought year.
We spend more time preparing seeds for exportation than we do gathering. We exceed the U.S.D.A. standards for our imports. I am a conservative gatherer. There has to be an abundant seed supply, we adhere to the local permits and customs of the host nation. Part of the process for our wild collections after it's stateside is a PCR assay. Followed by our previously mentioned "decision tree" model, then micropropagation as you suggested.
Are you familiar with Dara Emery’s book? Propagating California native plants by seed can be very tricky, particularly the fire tolerant species. I’m having better luck with air layering in situ.
BTW, I've not read your entire book, but I'm enthusiastic about what I've read so far. I've recommended it to our local land rights citizens group, KAPO and our County GOP. I'll finish it next month.
It’s an undertaking. Thanks for the referrals.
You ask whether cross pollenating wild rhody's is appropriate, if it results in adverse consequences. This I see as a two sided question. Here's why. In my world, an inferior hybrid does not make it to the micropropagation lab, nor does it with any reputable hybridiser.
I see this in perhaps a more complex light. Local varieties have properties of resistance to local pathogens, some of which can be in remission. Let’s say you come up with a variety that meets all your criteria for “superior,” they cross breed local stock, and then become dominant by virtue of their apparent fitness. Then the pathogen comes back and wipes them out. Consider how much more “fit” are the genes of currently obese people in a famine.
I gave you the example of the yerba santa and the monkeyflower for a similar reason. Neither are particularly pretty plants. Both are INCREDIBLY hardy. It’s their lack of desirability to ungulates that makes them of such value to the other species in the area, some of which might have difficulty without them.
Another example is cotoneaster, a weed species as far as I am concerned (they’re from Spain). The plant isn’t what one would really call invasive, but it does spread by birds they (love the berries) and does rather well here. If it’s growing under an oak the stuff can get to over thirty feet in height, forcing the oak into a condition where it loses its crossing branches and becomes structurally unstable. It’s also a fire ladder that, unlike the native bushes, would kill the oak. The natives are short enough to lighten the lower branches in a fire, a property that probably benefits the oak via end-weight-reduction, something for which homeowners are paying a LOT to tree services to accomplish in order to save their older oaks (it would be really cool to design a walking cherry picker to do that job in the woods).
Such interactions as I have described here are subtle. They certainly wouldn’t be noticed in a lab or test plot. No matter how careful anybody is, there will be errors, especially when we think we have things knocked. It’s the law, so to speak. If one is going to introduce, in my opinion, they had best be prepared to repair the consequences if they are wrong, or they shouldn’t be doing it.
However, I can envision a scenario where that could happen with a landowner and or gardener moving an infected old specimen. Who would be responsible then?
I guess that would depend upon the contract. We have problems with tree services moving pathogens now.
You mention in your book flora is not static due to naturally occurring mutations. I agree. One of the endless laws of Raulston rules of landscapes states: "You can throw a dart at a map of any location in the United States and within a half mile of the impact point, you can find totally new and wonderful plants that have new ornamental interest and potential." Do you assign this a value? (I apologize if you have, I didn't see it in your book yet.)
I don’t pretend to “assign” value to anything. I prefer to let the market set prices, only so long as competing risks are accounted.
I don't view the exotic issue a threat with the floriculture industry today. The use of DNA sequencing, micropropagation techniques, and the wholesale use of botanical benchmarks have effectively decreased the chance of an invasive species released to the public.
To what point? Most invasives today are hitchhikers in other goods, termites in palletes, clams in bilgewater, mosquitoes in ornamental bamboo… that sort of thing. It’s still happening. I see new weeds nearly every year. I have read that exotics may be invasive in as many as one in seven introduced species.
Consequentially, I view the crossbred native or transmutation of a native to be of superior value. Nature has its own safeguards that IF any new sport evolves in a region, it has market potential.
Nature might safeguard the species, but it may not protect what it displaces, thus creating a monoculture or narrow distribution. IMO, such must be taken on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think we can rely upon what at first appearance seems to me a risky assumption.
I’m sorry, although you are probably correct in 95% of the cases you evaluate, it’s the 5% that does cause me some concern. That concern has been induced by fighting the consequences of these disasters. It’s a horrible amount of work. I spend maybe 500 hours annually, just weeding.
Now of course I realize the problems that exists with non-native species already out there and the problems they cause, and I believe you address this in your book.
As I said, I see new ones every year. The rhododendron problem leading to “sudden oak death” arose in the mid-90s. Another phenomenon that escapes your ethic is that of adaptability to aperiodic singularities.
Consider how careful Monsanto has had to be with RoundUp Ready corn. They’ve spent many a million making sure that the pollen doesn’t cross breed with weeds. I just read last week of that it had happened anyway.
Let’s suppose that California red legged frogs are particularly adapted to long term drought. As of now they are being displaced by bullfrogs, brought over the Rockies by people. The bullfrogs do better in wetlands and the CLRFs hold out near grass. Assume the CLRFs go extinct (they’re on their way). Then we get the drought. The bullfrogs die. No frogs at all.
That is why I believe so strongly in offest markets. The CLRFs would be there in a maintained refugium because some landowner would be making sure of it because the market price of protected CLRFs had risen until it was worth it. Even if it takes an effort to maintain them, after a period of time with plenty of opportunity for such singularities as I posited to arise, the justification for keeping CLRFs going would drop and the costs rise to the point where the market would dictate that they go extinct as an inferior allele.
The system thus builds both the caution and the reserves to reverse course in case of error. I would think that such is something of which you would approve. After all, a CLRF is a handsome frog.
The puritanical attitude I see in the industry is very disturbing to me. I consider it a form of fascism. Not only do the worrywarts want to mindlessly dictate what is planted, they try to impose their placement, pruning, and volume standards on us liberty loving floriculturists.
As I said of my neighbors and their Italian thistle, I don’t care what my neighbors do with their property as long as the seed isn’t blowing over the fence (it does). I spend probably 50 hours a year dealing with it, pulling thistles out of native blackberry. There is the potential of yellowjackets and snakes in there.
Finally, I've got one more interesting story that is part speculation, but it should caution you on how complex are these issues. I know a company that is working to introduce redwood to New Zealand as a production tree. New Zealand has VERY strict rules about importing live material. They are doing an extended study and all transportation will of cours be sterile... but you see, there may be a problem with that. It's a little matter of redwood symbiotes.
Well, they found one of them (I think, partly by my query), they need microrhizal fungi in the soil for the redwood to survive. They are dutifully testing the compatibility of that fungus and will eventually figure that one out. OK, so now they've got surviving redwoods. Home free?
Maybe not. I've got a friend, Bud McCrary, who is a major timberland owner. He's done some interesting tests with fence posts. They found, contrary to popular wisdom, that ring cound density has NOTHING to do with the tree's famous decay resistance. In fact, they have some second growth trees that have as good a decay resistance as the famed old growth, and some old growth that rots right away.
Now, I've heard someplace (I don't for the life of me recall where) that redwood has a bacterium or some such that lives in its tissues. Could that be IT? Nobody knows.
The potential cost of error is what makes people think about these things. How much more expensive is it to conduct thest experiments serially? What would it cost if they got the forest in, waited for it to mature, harvested, installed the wood, and it rotted right away? It would cost A BUNDLE to remove the defective redwoods (theyr're almost impossible to kill). Would there be lawsuits and denial? You betcha. In that regard, systemic caution can save money.
Unlike most RICOnuts, I support these introductions, in part as a way to learn. They are much like fields in a factorial array of designed experiments. I just want a tempering force in the marketplace that can fix things when they go awry, WHICH THEY WILL.
It’s a matter of accountability.
I used to find plant life generally uninteresting and hated to go to Mom & Dad's as he would always pull out his slide projector and make us look at his interminable FLOWER PICTURES!!!
Now they're both gone and here's me, gittin interested... go figure.
They have beautiful purple veins in the cream petals.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.