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Synthesis
The data is in and honestly, it’s pretty surprising:
I expected to see a huge jump in diversity in both the scrub and forest communities as we went to communities that were more isolated. While there was definitely a steady increase in diversity with the forest community, the scrub community threw me off. Turns out, Millard Canyon offered the most biodiversity of the 3 scrub communities I studied. Switzer falls was really lacking in scrub diversity.
My hypothesis is that the level of human disturbance has a great effect on the diversity of a community.
The key word here is HUMAN disturbance. When looking back at the three sites I studied and how much humans passed through them, I can’t say I’m too surprised at my findings.
The forest communities had a reasonable level of increase in diversity. The more room these large oaks and pines had to grow, the more shade they were able to offer and the more moisture in the air and soil was being retained. This created desirable conditions for shrubby plants to grow in their understory, which served as habitat and resources for wildlife. These oaks, when left undisturbed created great and self-dependent ecosystems. In both Lower Arroyo and Millard Canyon, there were demarcated trails that passed through both forest communities. These trails are big and heavily trafficked, whereas the oak community in Switzer Falls didn’t have that level of foot traffic.
I’ve already mentioned that the scrub community was different - it was a lot harder to map out. The conditions of Millard Canyon were dry, hot and really exposed - yet it was the most diverse scrub community I saw. The community I mapped was on the side of the trails, but had a lot of room to grow upwards. The plants seemed to really benefit from the direct sunlight. The larger bushes like laurel sumac were planted higher up and created enough shade for plants like black sage and California sagebrush. While trails cut through these communities, they were not as heavily trafficked, because they were not immediately in areas where people walked through them. And the trails they were on were really empty.
In Lower Arroyo, there was just not enough nutrients. There was a wide open space for the scrub community to grow, but all the plants were really spread out from each other and the area was heavily trafficked by humans and horses. In Switzer Falls, the scrub community I studied was in the parking lot. There was a heavy staircase that went through this community and it was at a pretty steep slope. People came up and down the staircase a lot, and lots of cars drove past this community daily.
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DAY 3 @ SWITZER - FOREST
The forest at Switzer had a bunch of species that I hadn’t seen before. There were 3 or 4 oaks that created a canopy which allowed a mini scrub community to thrive.
Saw and heard some wildlife, mostly birds and LOTS of flies.
SPECIES LIST - FLORA
Arctostaphylos glauca
Ceanothus spinosus
Eriogonum fasciculatum
Symphyotrchum chilense
Artemisia douglasiana
Quercus agrifolia
Quercus chrysolepsis
Adenostoma fasciculatum
Rhus ovata
Quercus berberidigolia
Hesperoyucca whipplei
Arctostaphylos glanduloso
SPECIES LIST - FAUNA
7 ravens
4 woodpeckers
3 orbweaver spiders
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DAY 3 @ SWITZER - Scrub Community
I was expecting to see a much wider variety of species compared to Millard or Lower Arroyo, but that wasn’t the case. What I did see was a huge variety in the sizes of yerba santa I found throughout this area.
Saw and heard some wildlife, mostly in the form of insects - LOTS of grasshoppers and flies, some butterflies going around.
SPECIES LIST - FLORA
Prunus ilicifolia
Eriodictyon crassifolium
Eriogonum fasciculatum
Ceanothus spinosus
Hesperoyucca whipplei
Quercus agrifolia
SPECIES LIST - FAUNA
7 pallid-winged grasshoppers
7 ravens
3 painted lady butterflies
1 woodpecker
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Oaks
COAST LIVE OAK
Wider striations forming diamonds.
CANYON LIVE OAK
Thinner striations, linear, vertical
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Eriodictyon crassifolium
Date: 10/23/2019
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: Switzer Falls Trail, near the parking lot.
Route: At the parking lot, go towards the left towards the end of the parking lot. About two-thirds of the way to the bathroom, you’ll spot a set of stairs to the left. Yerba santa will be lining the stair case
Weather: 75 F, hot with no shade.
Habitat: Scrub community, mostly dominated by yerba santa, chapparal yucca, California buckwheat.
ERIODICTYON CRASSIFOLIUM- Thickleaf Yerba Santa
This plant is pretty fascinating. It’s name is spanish for “holy herb” which refers to the fact that this plant has SO MANY medicinal uses. If you get a cut, chew on the leaves and slap them onto it. If you have a headache, chew on the leaves and watch that headache go away. It can cure fevers, dry mouth, rheumatism, bruises, swelling, and more. There’s so much this plant can do.
Yerba santa is a shrub. I’ve mostly seen it as a small plant, but along this area, there were some taller ones reaching to my height. Yerba santa leaves are pretty long, and thick. They are sage colored and have hairs all over. It’s like they’re a thicker, tougher sage. The leaf shape resembles that of a mugwort plant, long, relatively thin, with points on both ends, except they have serrated edges. The thickness of the leaf is almost like as succulent or chapparal yucca. The leaves fold upwards into themselves along the main vein.
The leaves grow on the stem, and at the end of the stem, a couple might grow around the tip of the stem. I’ve read they’re supposed to have lavender flowers, however when I looked, many of the flowers had dried off. What was left were these little white and beige tufts, maybe where the flowers bloomed out of.
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Prunus ilicifolia
Date: 10/23/2019
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: Switzer Falls Trail, near the parking lot.
Route: At the parking lot, go towards the left towards the end of the parking lot. About two-thirds of the way to the bathroom, you’ll spot a set of stairs to the left. Go up about halfway up the stairs and cherry will be to your right.
Weather: 75 F, hot with no shade.
Habitat: Scrub community, mostly dominated by yerba santa, chapparal yucca, California buckweat.
PRUNUS ILICIFOLIA - Holly-leaf cherry
I’m pretty disappointed in myself or not getting a picture of this plant. Hopefully, my written description will be pretty good. Holly-leaf cherry is a shrub, but definitely a tall shrub, much like manzanitas.
The leaves and the fruit are what distinguishes the most. It’s leaves look like an extreme version of the coast live oak leaves. They’re rounded with heavily undulating serrated edges. The leaves are a true green, very shiny on top, and thick. (Much like coast live oak, except coast live oak has pretty matte leaves) If you crush the leaves, they smell a little bit like almonds.
The fruit of the tree is a cherry (duh), but it doesn’t look like a traditional cherry. It’s shaped like a cherry, and its red. The red is the skin, when you peel it off, you get some flesh (which is edible), but mostly it just protects the relatively large pit. The skin on the holly-leaf cherries I saw was beginning to peel off, revealing the cream-colored pit.
I did get some good pictures of cherry pits from when our class encountered bear poop! That was interesting...
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DAY 3 @ SWITZER - Artemisia douglasiana
Date: 10/30/2019
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: Switzer Falls trail heading towards oak forest.
Route: At the parking lot, go towards the left to the end of the parking lot. There will be a trail starting from there to your right. Follow the trail until you reach a grill to your left and continue walking until you reach a bridge. The mugwort will be there
Weather: 65 F, chilly and shaded
Habitat: Entryway to oak forest. There were some oaks, but mostly still shrubs at this point
ARTEMISIA DOUGLASIANA - California Mugwort
Me and mugwort have a weird relationship. I became obsessed with finding it after reading that the Tongva used it to induce vivid dreams. I thought, wow that might be cool. When I finally received a bundle, I was so excited to try it out. I had crazy dreams, scary dreams, weird dreams for about a week but not a lot of restful sleep, so I put my bundle away. It was nice to bump into my old friend while learning about plants at Switzer Falls.
Mugwort is a shrub, it can grow pretty short, but in this observation, I saw several shrubs coming together to form a giant mass of mugwort. This mass came up to about my stomach. The plant is multi-stemmed with long green leaves. The leaves were actually pretty cool, they were long and pointed and had brown veins in an alternating pattern on the leaf. The leaves were textured, they were fuzzy, the bottom of the leaf was sage colored, and formed a little hook.
If you took a leaf and crushed it, you got a strong smell of mint.
A lot of the mugworts were beginning to die. I could tell because many of the leaves were drooping downward rather than pointing upwards along the stem. The leaves that were dying lost the characteristic shape and began to curl in on themselves.
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DAY 3 @ SWITZER - Ceanothus of Switzer Falls
Hoaryleaf Ceanothus - Ceanothus crassifolius : thick lfull eaf, folds in downward on itself. Jagged, undulated edges. Dark green. Grows symmetrically on the stem.
Hairy Ceanothus - Ceanothus oliganthus : Thinner green shiny leaf. Flat at the bottom rounded up with a point at the end. Serrated edges with little teeth. Little hair on the veins of the plant. Veins grow in a trident shape
Green bark Ceanothus - Ceanothus spinosus : Thick green leaf with light green alternating veins. Leaf is ovally, flatter on bottom and sharply rounded at he top. The edges are little undulated with some serrating at the bottom. Bark is green/yellow with some thorns. Grow in alternating pattern on stem rather than symmetrically.
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Arctostaphylos glauca
Date: 10/16/2019
Time: 9:20 AM
Location: Switzer Falls, trail leading to oak woodland
Route: At the parking lot, go towards the left to the end of the parking lot. There will be a trail starting from there to your right. Follow the trail until you reach a grill to your left and there will be a slope. Take the slope about halfway up and you’ll see several Manzanita trees.
Weather: 70 F, shaded in oak forest understory
Habitat: Entering into an oak forest. Shrub community under oak forest.
ARCTOSTAPHYLOS GLAUCA - Big Berry Manzanita
Woo hoo! Another manzanita. The big berry manzanita was so pretty because of the color of its leaves. Like the Eastwood, it had flat leaves which were round and pointed at the tip. However, rather than being bright green, this was a pale green - the same tone as white sage. It also had slightly serrated edges, though these were barely noticeable until you got close to look at the plant. The veins on the plant were yellow and alternated along the leaf.
Leaves had little hairs, or dust on them. If you touched the leaf, you could see where your fingerprint was - like the pollen came off it when in contact with something else.
What I thought was coolest on this plant was its bark. It had a red bark that was peeling off. When it peeled, it rolled down, revealing these little pink rolls and a yellow/green bare bark. This made the plant look like it had these pink horizontal markings down its trunks.
The big berry manzanita did have fruit. It had these wrinkly cherry-looking fruits. They were a dark red circular fruit with wrinkly skin. You could peel the skin off and it revealed a brown pit.
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Arctostaphylos glandulosa
Date: 10/16/2019
Time: 9:15 AM
Location: Switzer Falls, trail leading to oak woodland
Route: At the parking lot, go towards the left to the end of the parking lot. There will be a trail starting from there to your right. Follow the trail until you reach a grill to your left and there will be a slope. Take the slope about halfway up and you’ll see several Manzanita trees.
Weather: 70 F with a lot of shade because of oak forest.
Habitat: Entryway to oak forest. There were some oaks, but mostly still shrubs at this point
ARCTOSTAPHYLOS GLANDULOSA - Eastwood Manzanita
This is such a beautiful plant. While it’s technically classified as a shrub, the Eastwood manzanita I encountered was at least up to my shoulder, if not a little taller. It had this muted bright green round leaf that came to a point. It had that same muted color that white and purple sage tend to have. Also similar to the sages, eastwood manzanita has little hairs on the leaves and stem - it’s a fuzzy plant! These hairs are relatively long compared to the sages however - if you hold up the plant, it’s really easy to see them. Unlike most other plants I’ve seen, the leaves of the Eastwood manzanita are flat and they grow upwards on the stems.
The stem of the leaf is pale green, pink, and cream. Like the big cherry manzanita, the main trunk has a red stem that seems to peel and reveal pale pink layers. The leaves grow in an alternating pattern on the stem with one leaf at the tip of each stem.
I wasn’t able to see any fruit on any of the Eastwood manzanitas I spotted. According the Calscape, the fruit on these shrubs is a little green orb.
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DAY 2 @ SWITZER - Symphyotrichum chilense
Date: 10/16/2019
Time: 8:50 AM
Location: Switzer Falls Canyon heading towards the beginning of the trail
Route: Walk left towards the end of the parking lot, there’ll be a small trail there. Take the trail, the aster will be on a hillside to your left past the mini California native plant garden.
Weather: 70 F, cool. Lots of shade in the understory.
Habitat: Entering into an oak forest - there was lots of shade but it wasn’t full on oak forest yet
SYMPHYOTRICHUM CHILENSE - California Aster
California aster has these delicate star-shaped purple flowers with a golden yellow center. They are a multi-stemmed bush, with pointed oval green/green-yellow leaves. They pop up almost like a weed. Most of the California Asters were extremely low to the ground - not more than 2 ft tall. This one in particular was about 10 inches high off the ground.
The stem and the leaves look like black sage leaves, but they don’t have the hairs on them that make sage fuzzy. The flowers grow off the sides of the main stem, with at least one flower at the end of the plant. Along with these, some California asters also had a fruit, which was this feathery little orb - almost like an extremely light dandelion.
At the base of each flower is this spiky green husk, which is what he flower seems to come out of. Some of the husks in this particular plant, have flowers which have either dried out or not blossomed.
While I was able to find lots of flowering asters, some of them had begun to dry out, leaving only bare bush stems. These dried out stems were beige/tan colored.
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COMMUNITY STUDY - Lower Arroyo vs. Millard Canyon
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DAY 2 @ MILLARD - True cocchineal bug
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DAY 3 @ MILLARD - Pacific tree frog
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DAY 3 @ MILLARD - Salvia mellifera
Date: 10/2/19
Time: 11:40 AM
Location: Brown Mountain Truck Trail @ Millard Canyon, past campsite
Route: @ Millard Campside, cross the stream and turn left, following the trail up past the oak forest. You’ll reach a fork in the road - go right. Follow the trail about 20 - 30 yards and you’ll see it to your left.
Weather: about 65 F; sunny with clouds clearing
Habitat: sage scrub community with 2 coast live oaks (not very tall) and lots of laurel sumac.
SALVIA MELLIFERA - Black sage
Even though its got a goth name - black sage is the brightest of all the sages.
Like the other sages (purple and white) the leaves are thick and bumpy with little white hairs all over. It’s aromatic - though I’d say not as much as the other sages. Black sage grows in a conical pattern off stems like white sage. It’s a bush-multi-stemmed with one thicker outer “trunk”. The leaves are almost neon green and almost yellow. They are about 3in long and thin like a mini salvia apiana leaf.
The edges of the leaf don’t have serrated edges, but they do have ridges. The top of the leaf is very textured and bumpy. Due to how apparent and deep veins are on this plant show though the black sages are done flowering now, but you can still see the seed pods. These seed pods are on their own branch and several (naturally 2-3) seed pods are usually on a branch. There’s one usually closer to the end, then some inches down there’s another, some inches down yet another. The seed pods are globes, the size of maybe a quarter. They look like these IKEA lamps with petals (dried and black) coming out of them. Look for these seed pods and a lime green leaf -- that’s black sage.
(vs white seed pods + short silvery leaf = purple sage)
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DAY 3 @ MILLARD - Malosma laurina
Date: 10/10/19
Time: 10:07 AM
Location: Brown Mountain Truck Trail @ Millard Canyon, past campsite
Route: @ Millard Campside, cross the stream and turn left, following the trail up past the oak forest. You’ll reach a fork in the road - go right. Follow the trail about 20 - 30 yards up the trail
Weather: about 65 F; sunny with clouds clearing
Habitat: sage scrub community with 2 coast live oaks (not very tall) and lots of laurel sumac.
MALOSMA LAURINA - Laurel sumac
Holy cow - these was so much Malosma in this area. Some of it was dried up, but most was still trying. Most of the berries were dried up leaving most of the with dead branches bearing no fruit. Still, the leaves were in pretty good condition. In areas where there was a lot of sun, the leaves curled in towards the branch on top of in their normal taco state. And the veins were more bulgy.
I found this plant normally on a slope towards the top of the community - is it because they provide shade to other plants?
Along with the coast live oak malosma was the most visited by animals, a lot of birds malosma were feeding from this plant. When scared they would dive toward the trash. It’s a great hiding spot for sure.
In this area, malosma is a pretty dominant plant - there were some bunches that were 10-20ft wide and 5ft deep
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