Lauren takes in the view at Anza-Borrego.
Lauren Anderson and Miguel Kaminsky are interns at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research through the Bureau of Land Management’s Seeds of Success Program. As part of the internship, they make collections of seeds from plant species vital to Southern California habitats. The seeds will be preserved and studied, and eventually help restore habitats damaged by fire or during development projects.
From day one at the Institute I’ve heard people talk about how beautiful the Anza-Borrego Desert is. This year’s Seeds of Success collections focused more on the areas surrounding Ramona. While the properties we scouted in the Ramona area were very diverse and interesting, they were all composed of the same types of plant communities. This was the first week we’ve been able to make it out to the desert transition areas leading into Anza-Borrego, and it offered the chance to explore something new.
Roadrunner
When planning to explore a new property, the first step is to find one that has access. For our internship, we are only allowed to make seed collections on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, and they don’t always have roads. We look at layers of BLM land on GIS and then choose one that looks reasonable to access. To do this, we largely depend on images from Google Earth. The only problem with this is that it can be difficult to determine if something is a dry creek or a little-used road. But for this desert adventure we were fairly sure that we could get within walking distance of the site.
Another part of scouting that is always fun is navigating back roads. The first dirt road we turned off on was well kept, the second one was less so, and on the third road I felt the tires sink a few inches into soft ground. We managed not to get the truck stuck, which was a very good thing since we didn’t have cell phone reception and faced having to hike several miles to a main road if we did.
The site itself was a combination of hills and dry-wash ravines with an amazing number of different plant species. Anza-Borrego definitely lived up to the hype. After exploring for a couple of hours, we determined that we could make three collections starting next week when the seeds would likely be mature enough to collect. Really exciting, and a reason to come back to enjoy Anza’s beauty!
Hi, Like to know reason, why news about park lions are not updated in zoo blog?
Moderator’s note: We’ll ask the Park’s lion keepers for an update.