Meetings:

Past Presentations

March 23, Thursday, 6-7:30 pm, ONLINE: Black Holes, White Gold: A Floristic Inventory of the Silver Peak Range, Esmeralda County, NV, with Peri Lee Pipkin, Masters student, Claremont University, 2022 WMRC Mini Grant and Bristlecone Chapter DeDecker Grant Recpient.

Peri Lee is conducting a floristic inventory of the Silver Peak mountains in Esmeralda County, Nevada. These desert mountains are arid yet full of incredible biodiversity, and range from valleys of alkali wetlands, cactus flats to red rock canyons, and peaks bearing lupines and bristlecone pines. There are several species of interest in the area, including the endemic and endangered Tiehm’s buckwheat, and the rare plant Tecopa Bird’s Beak. In addition to this floristic inventory, Peri Lee is also writing a conservation plan in order to preserve the threatened population of Tecopa’s Bird’s Beak that occurs in the alkali wetlands. This talk will be recorded. FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Recording available here or below:

February 23, 2023, Thursday, 6-7:30 pm ONLINE: Taxonomic and functional diversity of xeric alpine plant communities in a changing climate, with Kaleb Goff, PhD Student, North Carolina State University and 2022 WMRC Mini Grant recipient and Bristlecone Chapter DeDecker grant recipient. White Mountain Research Station Lecture

Kaleb will discuss findings that demonstrate climate change’s affects on plant diversity and functionality within the xeric alpine ecosystems of the White Mountains, California. His work is also in collaboration with GLORIA Great Basin, which has been monitoring plant communities in the White Mountains for the last 18 years. Registration required via Zoom. This talk will be recorded. FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

VIDEO OF PROGRAM BELOW; click full screen to view larger):

January 25, Wednesday, 7 pm: Chapter General Meeting HYBRID - Fire and Home Defensible Spaces, White Mountain Research Center, 3000 E. Line St., Bishop, Bristlecone Chapter Event

Speaker Yana Valachovic will present on fire and home defensible spaces. She is a California registered professional forester and forest scientist whose skills and interests cover a broad set of natural resource fields. She has worked as an extension agent at the University of California since 2000. Yana works at many scales and is a leader in developing and delivering local and state strategies to improve wildfire resilience. In her role, she is active in California policy development and has been a technical resource for bioenergy, forest management, home hardening, and improvements to defensible space legislation.

VIDEO OF PROGRAM BELOW (presentation begins at 6:10; click full screen to view larger):

December 7, 2022, Wednesday, 4 pm: Annual Holiday Potluck with Eastern Sierra Audubon, Bristlecone Chapter Event White Mountain Research Center, 3000 E. Line St, Bishop

Please join the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society & the CNPS Bristlecone Chapter for our Annual Holiday Potluck! Following the potluck, Katie Smith, Conservation Chair for ESAS will be giving a presentation titled, “The Biology and Conservation of Greater-Sage Grouse.”

The meeting will be held at the White Mountain Research Station on December 7th. Cocktails begin at 4:00 pm, Dinner at 5:30 pm, and Presentation at 7:00. Bring a dish to share, place settings, drinks, and a friend! Space is limited so please RSVP to conservation@bristleconecnps.org with the number of attendees and if possible, the dish you plan to bring.

By holding our gathering at WMRS there are requirements that we all must follow. If you are vaccinated, please bring your card showing your vaccination to Covid 19. If you are not vaccinated please provide proof of a negative covid antigen test result upon arrival. If you are coming from out of country or state, please quarantine 5 days prior to arrival. Masking is strongly recommended. Bring your flashlights because it is dark out there.

September 28, Wednesday, 7 pm: The noise can be the signal: variability and resistance in high elevation meadow plant communities in the Sierra Nevada , Speaker: Robert Klinger, PhD, Bristlecone Chapter Event, White Mountain Research Center, Owens Valley Station

Rob Klinger is an ecologist with the US Geological Survey and the statistician for their Western Ecological Research Center. He got his Ph.D. at UC Davis where he worked on plant-animal interactions and tree recruitment in neotropical lowland forests. He currently has a number of ongoing studies on the population dynamics of several endangered species, as well as a long-term, large-scale project examining relationships between fire, climate, non-native plants, and post-fire vegetation dynamics throughout the Mojave Desert. But in this presentation, he is going to be talking about his favorite project, another long-term and large-scale effort looking at different types of dynamics in alpine and upper subalpine meadow communities and how plant-animal interactions figure into those dynamics. VIDEO OF PROGRAM BELOW (click full screen to view larger):

May 25, Wednesday, 7 pm - Zoom presentation: New Calflora Tools for Your Native Plant Ventures and Adventures, with CalFlora Executive Director, Cynthia Powell. Bristlecone Chapter Event

Please join us to learn from Calflora’s Executive Director Cynthia Powell about new Calflora tools for CNPS native plant professionals, gardeners, and enthusiasts! Calflora aggregates millions of plant observations across the state from dozens of sources and serves them to the public free of charge. These data sources include CCH2 (a worldwide plant information portal from the California Consortium of Herbaria), iNaturalist, and CNPS plant checklists from around the state. How can you better use this incredible resource to learn more about regional plants?

At this presentation, Cynthia will cover Calflora’s planning your garden tool, specimen and other plant observations used in this tool, detailed plant ranges now available on Calflora’s species pages (for example, Grindelia stricta), population monitoring tools, and email alerts. She will also go over the important role CNPS members play in submitting and commenting on Calflora observations and checklists.

Also, Bryophytes are now in Calflora, and Calflora needs help from CNPS Bryophyte lovers to improve distribution information.

Cynthia Powell’s bio: After 3 years as Calflora’s GIS Project Manager, in 2016 Cynthia became Calflora’s Executive Director. She graduated with her MS in GIS (Geographic Information Science) in 2010 forecasting Mokelumne River water supply based on MODIS remote sensing snow pack images. She’s been examining what was under that snow — plants — ever since. She coordinates all Calflora programs, research, outreach, and advocacy, as well as fundraising and project management. Cynthia wears many hats.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://cnps-org.zoom.us/j/82851281696?pwd=b2orYWlacWk1eG8wSGlYWW83NEd6UT09
If needed: Meeting ID: 828 5128 1696; Passcode: 760533

March 23, 2022, Wednesday, 7pm: Plant diversity on a sky-island in the eastern Sierra Nevada: A flora of Coyote Ridge and Flat, Inyo County, CA with Martin Purdy, CNPS Bristlecone Chapter General Meeting and Program ONLINE

Martin Purdy is a MS student in Botany at California Botanic Garden / Claremont Graduate University. He has spent the last two and half years conducting a floristic inventory of the Coyote Ridge and Coyote Flat region of the Inyo National Forest, just southwest of Bishop, California. This talk will focus on interesting discoveries and results from the approximately 1,400 plant specimens collected for this project, which include new records for the Sierra Nevada range and one new record for the state of California.

Previous to graduate school, Martin worked as a field botanist/biologist on the Inyo National Forest, San Clemente Island, and Johnston Atoll and as an AmeriCorps member for the Bishop Paiute Tribe and Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Join Zoom Meeting on 3/23- click here.

Anelsonia eurycarpa and Lupinus sp. on Coyote Plateau, and Martin Purdy at Baker Canyon

December 8, 2021, Wednesday, 6:30 pm: Chapter General Joint Meeting with Eastern Sierra Audubon, Bristlecone Chapter Event -VIRTUAL gathering and presentation

Join us online for some social time with fellow Bristlecone Chapter members as well as Eastern Sierra Audubon at 6:30 pm followed by a virtual presentation at 7 pm on the Great Basin pinyon pine and using ecology to design post-fire restoration approaches. Guest Speaker Alexandra (Ali) Urza is a Research Ecologist with the US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, based in Reno, NV. She is a plant ecologist whose research focuses on the ecology of woodland and shrubland ecosystems of the western US. Her research uses observational, experimental, and modeling approaches to study plant community responses to fire, climate change, invasive species, and management treatments. She will talk about her work in the eastern Sierra on pinyon pine ecology and restoration. She is helping on a monitoring design with the USFS and BLM.

September 22, 2021, Wednesday, 7 pm: DeDecker Botanical Grant Research Projects, Bristlecone Chapter Event

Join us for lightning presentations from recipients of the 2021 Mary DeDecker Botanical Grant. The chapter will host an evening symposium covering local research in botany and ecology, with interactive discussion time on the important conservation relevance of each project. Click here for Zoom link.

Presenters and Presentations:

Carolyn Mills, a master's student at California Botanic Garden/Claremont Graduate University who works as a biologist with the Great Basin Institute in Death Valley National Park will share preliminary results of her research, including range extensions and new occurrences of rare taxa in the Nopah Range, and she’ll highlight Mary DeDecker's contributions to the flora.

Ashely Grupenhoff is an ecology graduate student at UC Davis studying the consequences of altered fire regimes on species composition, ecosystems, and future fire behavior. Ashley will examine the impacts of a recent thinning project on forest structure and the subsequent changes on plant diversity and predicted future fire behavior at Valentine Camp UC Natural Reserve near Mammoth Lakes.

Maria Jesus will discuss her master’s research documenting the flora of the southern Inyo Mountains—a regionally important plant area with limited representation in botanical collections. Maria recently graduated from California Botanic Garden’s botany program and is looking forward to advancing native plant conservation in her future endeavors.

Elijah Hall is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside studying how climate change is impacting flower-pollinator relationships through time (phenologically and interannually) and space (elevationally) in the White Mountains. Elijah will discuss how floral abundance and phenology can shift interannually and what these changes mean for the future of plants and pollinators in the White Mountains.

 

 

Previous programs:

Past Presentations with Recordings:

September 23, 2020, Wednesday: 7pm, Bristlecone Chapter Virtual General Meeting: California Desert Protection and Desert Flora - Recording available here if you missed it!

Virtual presentation by co-speakers Bryan Hatchell and Maria Jesus.

Bryan Hatchell, whose talk, "Desert Protection and Plant Connection" was canceled in March due to the pandemic, is the Desert Lands Organizer with Friends of the Inyo, and looks at energy development threats in the California Desert Conservation Lands. Plans that guide conservation and renewable energy development in the desert may rapidly change, which strengthens the need of continued advocacy for conservation and science. He will share landscape level issues and then narrow in on what neat desert plants that exist at each site of concern.

Maria Jesus whose April talk at the Maturango Museum and May field trip to Conglomerate Mesa were both cancelled due to the pandemic, is a master’s student at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden/Claremont Graduate University and a 2019 Switzer Fellow. Maria is researching the flora of the Southern Inyo Mountains, Inyo County. She states, “Here, Joshua trees, emblematic of the Mojave Desert, give way to Pinyon and Juniper woodlands which are characteristic of the Great Basin Desert. This unique transition zone is home to many endemic and rare plants including Hesperidanthus jaegeri, Nemacladus ‘inyoensis’, and Perityle inyoensis.” During her presentation, Maria will share her preliminary results of her floristic research, including new occurrences of rare taxa and an update on the conservation status of Conglomerate Mesa.

The recording of this program is available here.

October 20, Tuesday, 6-7pm: Conservation Stories, a Virtual Lecture Series, with Sophie Winitsky, California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden)

Sophie will give a talk on Calochortus excavatus tonight as part of this lecture series. To register, go to https://www.calbg.org/event/conservation-stories-a-virtual-lecture-series-featuring-sophia-winitsky - there will be a Zoom talk every third Tuesday of the month from 6pm - 7pm. Join in for an evening of conversation about conservation. You must register online to receive the Zoom link. The suggested program fee is $10, but there will be an option to register for the talk free of charge.

If you missed last month's virtual talk hosted by the California Botanic Garden featuring Sophie Winitsky discussing conservation issues in the Adobe Valley in Mono County with CalBG Director of Conservation Programs, Naomi Fraga, then look no further than the following link to watch a recording of the presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTXBoKbqXaY&t=1675s

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