October 30, 2018 This weekend I stepped away from the computer and stepped into the desert southwest. I have been to the Moab, Utah area many times before. My first trip was sophomore year of college on spring break where I drove to a campground in the dark and woke up with the sun to the most magnificent red rock cliffs I had ever seen. I was stunned by the beauty and have been in awe of that landscape ever since. Spring break every year after that led me back to the Moab region to explore slot canyons, mountain bike, and play. On backpacking trips with my cross-country ski team, we really became familiar with the desert landscape and with the life forms that survive the harsh desert conditions. Frog songs echo from the canyon bottoms at dusk in the spring as hundreds congregate at small pools to mate. Vegetation clings to these same pools, making canyon bottoms and springs incredibly lush. Beyond these transient water supplies, life depends on cryptobiotic soil crusts which are microbial communities that form a “carpet” over the desert sands. The soil crusts hold the soil/sand in place, collect water, and form a solid-nutrient rich structure from which plants can grow. When these crusts are young, they are almost imperceptible. When they are old (hundreds of years), they are highly visible as thick black mats in-between patches of cactus or sagebrush or flat sandstone bedrock. My ski coaches Christi Boggs and Rachel Watson inspired my respect for the soil crusts, showing me how quickly our favorite places might change if we didn’t think carefully about where we walked through the desert. We trained ourselves to place our feet only on existing trails or on solid sandstone, keeping soil crusts intact. And when we’d find a particularly old carpet, we’d all crouch down and appreciate the complexity of microbial colors and shapes growing on its surface. This weekend was my chance to see for the first time the Canyonlands Research Center (CRC), the site for my future work with the Barger Lab. The CRC is located at the historic Dugout Ranch just outside of Canyonlands National Park. I also had a chance to visit the restoration site where different methods are tested for restoring soil crusts on degraded desert lands. Since crusts take a long time to develop and are crucial for the growth of plants in these deserts, it is really important to figure out how to use crusts in restoration projects. Both the CRC and the restoration project site are in an incredibly scenic area that makes me want to sing Taylor Swift’s, “Wildest Dreams”. Lots of cool research happens at the CRC including rangeland monitoring, rain-out shelters simulating reduced precipitation, cottonwood tree genetics, drought experiments, sagebrush stressors, pollinator studies, and lizard responses to climate change. You can learn more at the CRC website if you are interested at https://canyonlandsresearchcenter.org/research/index. The facility itself includes tents, a classroom, and meeting room. Luxury living conditions for field work if you ask me. While the weekend made me pull out the ecology texts and start researching “soil restoration”, Monday refocused me abruptly with a Data Structures homework assignment on deleting a node of a tree. Sounds simple right? Just break off a branch from the tree and that’s it! Nope, coding it was a lot harder than expected. Our cohort also has an Optical Imaging midterm this Friday. So, IQ Biology once again has my focus. I’ll save soil crusts for my wild desert southwest dreams.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
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