Kainoa Kawabata, Geology and Environmental Studies Major, shares about their internship with Salmon Valley Stewardship, Salmon, ID
“Salmon-Challis National Forest’s Native Plants Restoration Program seeks to reintroduce native plants to areas that have been taken over by invasives. The number one species threatening the livelihood of the rangeland ecosystems this program seeks to restore is Bromus tectorum, or cheatgrass. This annual grass is extremely prolific, and when left unchecked can quickly become the only plant in an area, choking out everything around it and leaving patches of hillsides dark red when the cheatgrass dries out in the summer.
Herbicide spraying is something I have always been skeptical about, but 
when used correctly it has had tremendous success controlling cheatgrass with little to no effect on other species present in the treated ecosystems. The Forest Service has been ramping up its spraying efforts to try and control the progress of invasive species assault on natural landscapes, and as those species disappear they leave a lot of bare ground. The Native Plants Restoration Program is trying to fill that space with species that are already around, but need a bit of a boost to take hold. Starting this fall, one of the people I have been working with will be designing and deploying seedballs, which are little balls of clay and soil that contain seeds to help fight the cheatgrass as it tries to return. Our hope is that if these native plants take root they will help stop the spread of invasive species as they try to return to treated areas.
In the past couple of weeks I have spent many of my days collecting seeds for the program. With a group of 3 or 4 I’ll spend most of the day in the field collecting either full plants or just seed heads to be used in seedballs. We meet at the office in the morning, where we go over the plan for the day, before packing up the truck and heading out. Our commute to the collections sites is anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half driving through the beautiful Salmon and Lemhi Valleys. Once we reach our site we do a quick scouting hike, looking for the plants we plan to collect, as well as figuring out all of the species in the area, and looking at the landscape to make sure where we are collecting is similar to where these seeds will be planted. This last part is vital in ensuring the plants that grow from the seeds we collect are genetically suited to where they will be planted. After we’re done scouting, we spend at least an hour at each site walking around with paper bags collecting plants, being careful not to pick too many so as not to disturb the species’ ability to reproduce. At the end of the day we return to the office and sort through what we have collected before putting it on drying racks, and eventually moving it to cold storage.
In total, we have collected from over 9,000 plants so far. With each plant potentially having dozens of seeds, and in some cases more, we already have hundreds of thousands of seeds to eventually be put in seedballs, with much more collecting to be done.”