NEW CNDDB ONLINE QUAD VIEWER

 

Discovered and sent by Katie Barrows!

 

This information was provided by Roxanne Bittman, Lead Botanist, California Natural Diversity Database, California Department of Fish and Game.

 

Did you ever wish you could just go online to see what the California Natural Diversity Database (CNDDB) has for a particular area? The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) has just developed a way to access this important database over the web. The DFG maintains a database of occurrences of rare species of both plants and animals, called the California Natural Diversity Database (CNDDB). This database is the underpinning of the rare plant program, providing both documentation of the existence of species and a guide for planners, environmental groups, and concerned citizens who work to protect these species.

 

Using the DFG's new Quad Viewer tool, you can learn online what species have been reported within a topographic quadrangle. Go to www.dfg.ca.gov/whdab and click on the left link "Quad Viewer." Follow the instructions that come up when you first launch the program or click the Help tab once the viewer is open. There are separate buttons for the data already processed in the CNDDB and for data still to be processed. In addition, there are tools that generate lists from a nine-quad area (the quad you pick plus the eight surrounding quads) for CNDDB data and the backlog, respectively.

OUR FEATURED PLANT, Astragalus tricarinatus (Continued from page )

been, at best, only poorly explored, and botanists have long wondered whether it may occur in remote canyons elsewhere in desert mountain ranges.

 

Because so few plants are ever seen in one place botanists have suspected that washes and canyons may not be Astragalus tricarinatus’s primary habitat, and that plants in these habitats are more likely “waifs” washed down from unknown upland populations. Only limited efforts have been made to survey lands above the canyon bottoms where it occurs, and these efforts had not yet discovered A. tricarinatus on upland sites.

 

A valuable discovery

In April 2004, while hiking to a remote site in the southeastern San Bernardino Mountains, John Green (of AMEC Environmental Services) and I ran across a substantial Astragalus tricarinatus population in the Whitewater River watershed. We didn’t have much time, but we counted 170 plants visible from the trail – many more than the largest number ever seen before. The plants were growing on uplands, well above the washes, and were seen only on an unusual metamorphic rock weathering into an unproductive gravelly soil.

 

This new milk-vetch occurrence is on private land, surrounded by National Forest and Bureau of Land Management Wilderness. The land is owned and managed for permanent conservation by The Wildlands Conservancy, a private conservation foundation (it was only through The Wildlands Conservancy’s efforts that the land has kept its wilderness character). The site is only accessible on foot, about a 12 mile round trip from the Mission Creek Trailhead. I made arrangements with The Wildlands Conservancy to revisit the site. A few weeks later, I returned to the site with RSA Seed Collections Manager Michael Wall; US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and RSA Research Associate Gary Wallace; consulting biologist and RSA graduate Michael Honer; Chris True and Robert Cox of the UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology; and Brad Cadman, ranger with The Wildlands Conservancy. After hiking about 3 hours to the site, we walked over as much of the metamorphic outcrop as time allowed, and counted a total of 300 Astragalus tricarinatus. Most of these were reproductive adult plants, but juvenile and seedling plants also were present. We collected seed for long-term storage in RSA’s seed collection, voucher specimens for permanent study and reference in the RSA Herbarium, and soil samples for further analysis. True and Cox hiked to a few other, similar, outcrops and discovered additional A. tricarinatus occurrences.

 

Based on this discovery, biologists will now be able to identify other likely Astragalus tricarinatus habitat using geology maps and aerial photographs (and, of course, boot leather). Further analysis and field work could reveal new source or ‘founder’ populations higher up in the Mission Creek and Morongo Canyon watersheds where A. tricarinatus is known only from scattered plants in the washes. With this new information, field work in the desert mountains may also lead to the source population of the solitary outlying plant in the Santa Rosa Mountains, or substantiate the long-doubted reports in Joshua Tree National Park or the Orocopia Mountains.

 

Scott D. White is a biological consultant with White and Leatherman BioServices and a research associate at RSA. The Wildlands Conservancy is on the web at http://www.wildlandsconservancy.org. Access to the Mission Creek Trail is available by appointment through the Pipes Canyon Reserve at (760) 369-7105.

 

Many thanks to Katie Barrows for obtaining this article for RSB Chapter.