New Mexico on Fire

To continue with my series on NM plant communities, this month I've been wondering what's been lost and what's been put at risk with the recent wildfires.  The Hermits Peak - Calf Canyon and Cerro Pelado fires had me worried and now the Bear Trap fire on Mt. Worthington and Black fire in the Black Range are burning through large areas.  Now as I type this, it's May 21st and there's a new fire that sprang up overnight southeast of Corona.  With forecasts for windy or breezy afternoons until Wednesday, there's lots of potential for more trouble.  

What endangered plant species are being threatened by these fires?  If you think these fires are too localized or merely burning through "ordinary" forests, think again.  Many of our NM endemics are narrow edaphics, restricted to certain soil types.  Some of these are gypsovags (tolerate gypsum) gypsophiles (require gypsum) while others are limited to calcareous or limestone-derived soils.  

As a case study, I'm worried that the Hermits Peak Fire will jump across the Pecos and take out all the populations of Ipomopsis sancti-spiritus.  Direct high-temperature burns aren't the only problem.  Past fires in the Jemez led to disastrous flash floods.  Those follow-on events after the wildfire finished off Dixon's apple orchards and appear to have eliminated the population of lady slipper orchids near the Upper Crossing in Bandelier.  

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Since then on 5/26 we've had a close call in the North Valley.  A fire that started on the west bank of the Rio near the Bosque School jumped the river to an area just north of the Candelaria Nature Center.  In the face of 20 mph winds, officials ordered evacuations for the area between Candelaria and Montano west of Rio Grande Blvd west to the river.  

Being only a mile further east, I packed our jump bags into the car and started to go down my to-do list for an evacuation:

• Top off the battery charges on all the cellphones
• Contact cousin in case we need to relocate
• Get Henry Cat into his carrier
• Grab all his medications
• Find the box turtles out back and get them in their carrier
• Unplug the computers and put the CPU's in the trunk

Fortunately, with the setting sun the wind died down.  Soon after the evac. order was lifted.  Tip o' the hat to the City's airboat patrols that keep watch on the bosque as they run up and down the river 24x7.  

Stand down from red alert.  <whew>

Not that I know of any endangered species in this area of the ABQ bosque, this has been a reminder that anywhere in the state could be threatened at a moment's notice.  This Memorial Day weekend will see us facing windy days and stupendously dry conditions.  My brother sent me this URL -- https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/primary/waves/overlay=relative_humidity/orthographic=-102.94,38.07,665/loc=-109.004,37.759 -- to a online global map of relative humidity (among other things).  Spin it around and you'll see that we're about as dry as the middle of the Gobi Desert, the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia, or the Qattara Depression in Egypt. 

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Back to the question at hand, a good first step is to see what biodiversity areas have been impacted by these May wildfires.  Here's the map of Important Plant Areas from Natural Heritage NM (https://nhnm.unm.edu/botany/nm_rare_plant_conservation_strategy) with approximate fire perimeters as of 5/28 overlain.  

Bear Claw narrowly misses IPA 67, San Mateo Mtns (high biodiversity). 

Black has almost completely consumed 65, East Fork Gila River Watershed (high biodiversity). 

Calf Canyon - Hermits Peak has seriously damaged about half of 22, Sangre de Cristo (outstanding biodiversity). 

Cerro Pelado has burned a chunk of 19, Jemez Mtns (moderate biodiversity). 

Cook's Peak has nibbled away at 110, Upper Canadian Watershed (very high biodiversity). 

Taking the Black Fire as an example, let's try to see what species are at risk.  I'm going to simplify matters by limiting my search for wildfire-threatened species by assuming that the fire is only affecting Sierra County.  It's mostly in Sierra, but does hop over into Grant and Catron.  Forecast high winds for this weekend may push the northern boundary into Socorro County.  

Using the search feature at the NM Rare Plant List, we can ask to see "Weakly conserved" species in "Sierra" county:  

The results are these 12 taxa:

The trick now is to separate the species found in the Black Range from those found elsewhere, especially across the valley in the San Andres or more widely distributed ones. 

Looking for each species in iNaturalist is slow, but eventually you can track down whatever info they have.  The main problem is the lack of any sightings at all for many rare plants.  

• I came across a Penstemon metcalfei location northeast of Emory Pass.  For the moment, that population is safe.  
• Packera neomexicana var. metcalfei didn't turn up, but an observation tentatively ID'ed as var. mutabilis from 2013 was in the database and showed a location of 33.4113, -107.9387 in Taylor Creek.  The photo seems to show a plant with glabrous, dentate leaves, so it could be metcalfei.  Sadly, today's National Fire Situational Awareness map shows this to be on the edge of the official perimeter, in an area with lots of hotspots showing on satellite imagery, and likely already burned.  
• Grindelia arizonica var. neomexicana turns up in iNaturalist on the ridge east from Victorio Park Mtn.  That's an area that is not yet burned, but with strong westerly winds this weekend, that population could be at risk.
• Draba mogollonensis has been sighted in Paramount Canyon of the Black Range.  Like Packera, this population is on the north side of the fire where active hotspots indicate that there is still rapid fire growth.  Not good.

That's all I've got.  Be safe, everyone.  

More on NM Rare Plant Communities #nmpcomm

The New Mexico Rare Plant Technical Council just lost their chairperson, Daniela Roth, to other profession opportunities. She was a tireless advocate for NM's natural environment and especially its rare plants. Although Daniela worked for the NM State Forestry Division, she is recommending that her replacement(s) be in the NM Natural Heritage Program. That leads me to this edition of my on-going monthly essays on NM rare plant communities with a stroll through the Natural Heritage online maps (https://nhnm.unm.edu/).

Our first map today is of the US Forest Service Research Natural Areas in AZ and NM. These are selected areas that are conserved for long-term research. An accompanying spreadsheet (https://nhnm.unm.edu/sites/default/files/nonsensitive/USFS%20RNA%20Overview.xlsx) gives details on each of the 52 RNA's and gives one a good idea of the amount of fieldwork and thought that goes into choosing these areas as part of a southwestern environmental monitoring network.

The website goes on the say, “...work is ongoing to expand it to include other protected natural areas such as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACECs), refuges, and preserves. We invite you to explore information about network sites through the ArcGIS Viewer, consider doing work on them for research and protection, and to suggest sites that should be added to the network.”

Sounds like an invitation for some serious citizen science.

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The remainder of today's maps are generated with the NM Environmental Review Tool (https://nmert.org/content/map) with its many layers of information. Layers can be toggled on or off to overlay whatever features you desire. My examples make use of only one or two layers at a time for simplicity.

Our second map is of NM State Forestry's Priority Landscapes. These are areas identified for restoration across all jurisdictions with forest and woodland cover types and maps the top 500 watersheds in the state ranked by wildfire risk and importance for water source protection and biodiversity. There are some odd features here and there, like the odd boundaries in the southern Jemez, but I assume these are more administrative lines than anything else.

Map #3 is the US Fish and Wildlife Service refuges and critical habitat. No surprises here, although many people don't realize how big the Sevilleta Refuge is. It runs from the Sierra Ladrones almost over to Abo.

Map #4 is a slice of the crucial habitat layer (somehow different from "critical habitat"). When looking at this data for the entire state, the map is a difficult to understand set of blue blotches. Zooming in gets you to the meat of the matter. The sample I included here runs from an area surrounding Voght Draw in the west to the southern Jemez Mountains in the east. The map legend shows six shades of blue running from pale to dark, least to most crucial habitat. Lots of small pockets of deeper blue out by White Mesa, Cuchilla Blanca Hill, southwest of San Luis in the Rio Puerco, and Tapia Canon further south. I'd say those are great places to go plant hunting. While some are very remote, others are right off the pavement.

The last map I want to share today explains much about why native plant conservation is difficult in NM. This one shows land ownership and NM is a crazy quilt of federal and state administrations interspersed with private lands. With so many administrative units and so many definitions of what is crucial or critcal habitat, what is a threatened, endangered, or rare plant, it's no wonder that delimiting important areas is a Sisyphean task.

Plant Diversity

Part of my reason for posting these monthly essays on NM plant communities was to get my own mind wrapped around the problem of where should we be putting our efforts, both time and money, into conservation. It's one thing to look at the individual rare plants listed at https://nmrareplants.unm.edu/ and another thing all together to look at them in terms of their ecological contributions. In turn, where can I as an individual make an impact?

Biodiversity is a critical part of sustainable development. A vibrant, diverse, and healthy environment provides everything from harvestable resources, nature tourism, wild genes to improve domestic crops, pest management, sources of medicine, and biologically-based environmental clean-up (https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1994.0089). Sustainable development and the maintenance or enhancement of biodiversity relates in little-explored ways to ecosystem function, stability and resilience.

The draft UN convention on biological diversity (CBD) sets out biodiversity targets for the end of the decade that include protecting 30% of land and sea, eliminating billions of dollars of environmentally harmful government subsidies, and restoring at least a fifth of degraded freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems. The final version will be negotiated in Kunming, China, at the Cop15 summit, which is expected to be held at the end of August (2022). The CBD balances three main goals: conservation, sustainable use of biodiversity, and the fair sharing of benefits from genetic resources.

As I write this (3/28/22), BBC has published a primer on biodiversity at https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-60823267. Without getting too deep in the weeds, they illustrate the key issues in five graphics. They define biodiversity as the variety of all life on Earth. It turns out, it's not that simple.

So what is biological diversity, that is, biodiversity? These essays on ecological regions, life zones, and community evolution with a focus on New Mexico have been using the term without formal definition.

For most people, biodiversity is simply the number of species in an area, which in the older ecological literature was called “species richness.” In a seminal paper by Harper and Hawksworth in 1994 (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb1990/1994/345/1311), only six years after Elliot Norse gave the term a proper definition in the literature, some important questions were raised: What is ‘biodiversity’? Is biodiversity just the number of species in an area? If biodiversity is more than the number of species how can it be measured? Are all species of equal weight? Should biodiversity measures include infraspecific genetic variance? Do some species contribute more than others to the biodiversity of an area? Are there useful indicators of areas where biodiversity is high?

Let's run through some of these...

A little reflection will show us that the number of species in an area isn't of much use, even though at first blush one might think otherwise. Because we tend to emphasis organisms that are visually obvious to us, we think of a landscape that is biodiverse as one with lots of differences at the macroscopic level.

But imagine an island with exactly two organisms. Are the following pairs all equally biodiverse?

• A 'Gala' apple tree and a 'Honey Crisp' apple tree (different cultivars)

• An apple tree and a rose (different genera in the same family)

• An apple tree and a grass (different phyla)

• An apple tree and a mouse (different kingdoms)

Obviously, a measure of biodiversity should take into account how different the various organisms are. A metric that uses increasing phylogenetic divergence or number of taxa or genetic variability might seem attractive but there are problems that for now we'll dismiss with a wave of the hand.

It would be handy to include some measure of infraspecific biodiversity in a particular location or population. At the BioPark Zoo, there are species survival plans (SSP's) for animals that take into account genetic relationships among a species across all collections at all accredited zoos to avoid inbreeding. Only recently have I read discussions about taking care to maintain genetic diversity among living collections in botanic gardens and arboretums.

Particularly worrisome in a world being fed increasingly by monocultures is the loss of genetic diversity in crops. One of the IUCN specialists at the BioPark recently gave a fascinating webinar on diversity or the lack thereof among apples and crab apples. Similarly, the NY Botanical Garden had a webinar on crop wild relatives with much the same message: we need wild species as genetic backstops for future agricultural improvements.

From my own experience as a horticulture postdoc at NMSU, we had assembled a large collection of onion genera in order to find genes for disease-resistance. Another professor collected field races of chiles in order to capture the variability within the species. In either case, the economic importance of the crops made the argument for conserving diversity.

But economic importance isn't the only metric for determining which aspects of biodiversity are “worth” conserving. We need the natural environment outside of agricultural production for a host of reasons ranging from recreation to climate moderation.

Turning our attention back to NM, Natural Heritage New Mexico out of the Museum of Southwestern Biology and Dept. of Biology at UNM have come up with a methodology for estimating biodiversity in areas of the state. Their biodiversity score (scale of 1 to 10) is an average of the scores for three factors: size, quality, and landscape integrity. The landscape integrity score is down-weighted by 50% to account for uncertainty in the accuracy of that layer.

Like our NY Times maps, NHNM used NatureServe maps where possible to generate Element Occurrences that defined populations of species of interest. Using some slick GIS tricks, this allowed them to generate Element Occurrence polygons that grouped populations together into areas of interest where their scoring methods could be applied.

One result is a map of NM that ranks areas of biodiversity. (I've slightly modified their color-coding to minimize the optically biased effect produced by their strong yellow color for moderate biodiversity. Instead, I've made 'Moderate' the palest color instead of the brightest.) The polygons are Important Plant Areas (IPA) and ranked by their Biodiversity Rank and Diversity Score. There are 150 IPA's in NM.

Within an hour's drive of Albuquerque, we find these IPA's:

23^* Espanola to La Cienega

34^* White Mesa

35 Lower Jemez River Valley

36 Espinosa Ridge

42 Rio Puerco / Rio San Jose

43 KAFB

44^* Sandia Mtns

45 South Mtn

55 Rio Grande at Belen

56 Sevilleta Basin

142 Socorro and Strawberry Peaks

*Indicates IPA with outstanding biodiversity rank. 

Historical Ecology and Community Evolution

Paleoecology has been an aspect of paleontology since the earliest days of the scientific study of fossils as people sought to understand what the world might have looked like across geological timescales. What did a brontosaurus eat? What did a forest of tree ferns look like? Viewed through that lens, paleontology combined with ecology, climatology, and biology gives us a powerful means of understanding our environment's history. When we start taking underlying geology and overlaying it with past climates, we provide a window into how ancient communities adapted (or not) and came to be in the present day. They expanded or contracted, shifted spatially, and changed their specific composition as time passed.

If you start digging (literally) around in New Mexcico's history, you discover that things were much more mesic back in the day... say, 12,000 years ago. Here's the Pleistocene map side-by-side with an admittedly low-resolution modern vegetation map.

As the last ice age passed and the world grew more clement (from a human's point of view), the alpine areas retreated to above 12,000' and mixed conifer forests shrank right behind. Most obviously though, large areas of yellow pine, aka, Pinus ponderosa, aka Ponderosa pine, insinuated themselves between the piñon-juniper forests and the spruce-fir mountain tops.

As New Mexico warmed, it also dried out. What is now the Chihuahuan Desert contains a large number of landlocked basins. What were once lakes, now became ephemeral playas and salt lakes, depending on what sorts of minerals were brought down out of the geological formations in the surrounding watershed.

And speaking of minerals in the nearby geological formations, limestone layers lifted from seas millions of years old, gypsum beds from long lost mineral-rich marine environments, granite outcrops from ages before the dinosaurs, and basaltic outpourings from many millions of years ago, all contribute to New Mexico's diversity. From these layers, soils of marvelous complexity have been derived.

These edaphic pockets have led to many speciation events in New Mexico. The high levels of endemism we have here are due to the complexity of the environmental matrix: temperature ranges, moisture regimes, soil types, and vegetative history. If you want to find a species new to science and maybe get immortalized with a specific epithet of your very own, the places to look are these weird, isolated habitats with odd soils.

When we toss in human interaction, both pre- and post-1598 (Juan de Oñate's arrival in NM), we add still more variable to the environmental matrix. Once transoceanic vessels began carrying cargo to the New World, it became a foregone conclusion that invasive species would arrive from other continents. From that point on, we've been mucking around with the natural environment in a much accelerated way.

I've just finished reading an article on range size and extinction probabilities (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.13003). Their conclusion:

Although it is expected that species with smaller ranges will be more vulnerable to global extinction from habitat loss than widespread ones, because the drivers of threat are more likely to affect the entire range of these species, we emphasize that there is a lack of studies that quantify this expectation at different spatial scales. Here, we find that relatively small-ranged species are more vulnerable to extinction from habitat loss even at a local scale. This will necessarily cause a disproportionate effect of range size on the risk of extinction at broader spatial scales. Understanding and quantifying the mechanisms that determine local extinction risk from anthropogenic change, how these depend on spatial scale and how local extinction risk, in turn, can be used to predict the consequences of range loss will be imperative for the conservation of species.

The bottom line is that New Mexico's geography, geology, climatology, and history have conspired (in a manner of thinking) to produce a state where we have lots of small-ranged plants that are very diverse yet threatened. Even wide-ranging plants are often only found in localized pockets, for example, cienegas or gypsum outcrops.  Scale becomes important in assessing threats.  

Here's a map from NatureServe (https://explorer.natureserve.org/) published in the NY Times last week. They've overlaid landuse, in particular, protection status, with the number of endangered species. The result is a glimpse at the general state of play in terms of conservation status.  

The Grey Lady had other maps that showed the distribution of endangered or imperiled species at the national level. New Mexico has lots of red splashed over it, which is not necessarily a good thing.  

There's a lot going on here, so I'll just leave this for the moment.   Suffice it to say, biodiversity isn't as straight-forward as one might think.   In an up-coming essay, I'll return to how people are coming up with these maps.  Then I'll do a deep dive into the spatial distribution of NM's rare and endangered plants. 

 More to come.

Life Zones

Clinton Hart Merriam (1855˗1942) published on the concept of life zones over 100 years ago, beginning with 1892 and 1894 papers. But he was not the first to conceive of a spatially explicit relationship between the distribution of biota and climate. Möbius had coined the term 'biocenose' in 1877 to describe a community of living beings. Another early naturalist, Grisebach in 1838 introduced the term “formation” as a concept to embrace a large-scale plant community. Dialing even farther back, we find Alexander von Humbolt writing about “associations” in 1805.

The more recent versions of the life zones model cross-reference temperature (either as altitude or latitude) and moisture (as precipitation, humidity, and evapotranspiration). The results breakdown into life zones ranging from deserts to rain forests with all sorts of steppes, scrubs, woodlands, and forests.

Turning back to Merriam's work at the turn of the last century in the Southwest, we find him classifying NM's life zones as: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, and Arctic-Alpine. A 1898 review of Merriam's work (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1626459.pdf) points out the difficulties of working with these fairly simple models.

Today we see these life zones reworked for NM as: Desert, Grasslands/Woodlands, Transition, Coniferous Forest, Subalpine, and Alpine zones. For children and the young-at-heart, I recommend downloading this coloring book – https://www.wildlife.state.nm.us/download/education/conservation/coloring-books/Life-Zones-Coloring-Book.pdf.

Another more modern approach is the USDA's classification of landscapes by means of average annual lowest minimum winter temperature. That's a mouthful. Basically, they've mapped the US and color-coded it by how cold it might get in a typical year.

The USDA published these maps in 1990 and have revised them as of 2012 using 1976-2005 data. Here's the 1990 map for the north-central NM.

And here's the 2012 revision with its much higher resolution.

One important thing to notice is the obvious expansion of Zone 7b to now include most of metropolitan Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. One could be tempted to attribute this to climate change or maybe it's just better data.

While we're looking at patterns of vegetation and their relationship largely to minimum temperatures, it's informative to see what the historical cold spells have looked like.

You can definitely spot the cold air drainages in the state!

Now, just to provide for equal time for "fair and balanced," here's the USDA map of heat zones. These are the flip side of the cold-hardiness maps and show how many days an area is above 86°F.

But when one tries to map these layers onto the ecoregions or modern versions of Merriam's life zones, there is only superficial correspondence. That's because temperature, altitude, precipitation, and evapotranspiration are just a snapshot (more or less) of current conditions at a location. They don't capture the immense amount of geological and historical time that have had an impact on the plant communities, their soil, and co-evolving animal populations.

More to come...

NM Plant Communities

People who have studied and thought a great deal about natural communities have created a system of nomenclature that has a hierarchy identifying areas with generally similar characteristics. These include geology, physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land use, wildlife, and hydrology. Various authorities from the early 20^th Century to the present have come up with systems of nomenclature to classify the spatial diversity of life on Earth. Terminology like biomes, ecoregions, ecosystem types, ecozones, biogeographical realms, life zones, ecological units, plant formations, and plant hardiness zones have been defined, often as part of a hierarchy.

Here I'm going to look at plant life in New Mexico, even though that's a particularly artificial political entity defined in 1912. My rationale is that this is the geopolitical unit where we (resident members of Native Plants of New Mexico) can have direct access to the levers of government, both by petition and vote. Thus, this is a level where we can have a significant personal impact.

True, we can and should make efforts at the local level (city and county) as well as at national and international levels. In fact, <spoiler alert> I believe that conservation of biodiversity can't be successful unless we take concrete steps at the very most local of levels, our backyards and porches.

We mistakenly believe that we need to save nature so that future generations can enjoy it. What we really need to do is save nature so that we have future generations.

Somehow, we've gotten this idea that humans and nature cannot coexist. The UN designates Biosphere Reserves as places of ecological significance. That language suggests there are places on planet earth with no ecological significance. Every square inch of the Earth has ecological significance, including our yards, including our corporate landscapes, including our roadsides, and even much of our agriculture. We can't just build biological corridors that connect natural areas, so that plants and animals can move back and forth between relatively small, protected, viable habitats. We need to create more viable habitats.

Stewardship of the Earth and conservation of biodiversity is not just something relegated to specialist biologists. Every single person depends entirely on the quality of our ecosystems, so why wouldn't everybody bear the responsibility of taking care of those ecosystems? It doesn't mean that you have to save biodiversity for a living, but you can save it where you live. One person can totally revitalize the their little ecosystem in their yard and enhance their local ecosystem.

This will bring us around to the questions of what is a native plant and why should I plant them in my yard or grow them in a pot on my apartment balcony? Gingkos used to grow in NM 7 million years ago. Are they native? Mesquite arrived 400 years ago. Is it native? Perhaps we're better off asking what ecosystem services a plant provides. What links in the damaged fabric of life does a particular plant create or strengthen?

Now that I've shown where I'm going with this series of essays, let's take a shot with analysis at the state level and see where it gets us in terms of conservation of biodiversity, especially native plants. If we're going to have a discussion about NM plant communities, it seems like we should start with the view from 10,000 meters (or 39,000 feet, if you prefer). From that point of view, we see things with the broadest of possible brushes. Let's start with ecoregions.

Ecoregions

At the most coarse set of divisions, Level 1, we see that NM has five ecoregions: Northwestern Forested Mountains, North American Deserts, Temperate Sierras, Southern Semi-arid Highlands, and the Great Plains.

This hardly captures the diversity that NM has. Level 2, with its slightly finer grain, catches more of this detail in six ecoregions. Now at least the North American Deserts have been subdivided into Cold Deserts (10.1) and Warm Deserts (10.2). These correspond to the Great Basin Desert and the Chihuahuan Desert. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the dividing line runs right about through Polvadera, north of Socorro. The majority of our central and western mountains are now labeled Upper Gila Mountains. 12.1 in the extreme southwest is identified as Western Sierra Madre Piedmont.

By the time we get to Level 3 ecoregions, things are pretty stable, at least for NM in terms of number of regions – 8 of them. We have 6.2.14, the Southern Rockies up north and 10.2.4, the Chihuahuan Desert down south. To the east, the Great Plains have been resolved into 9.4.3, Southwestern Tablelands, and 9.4.1, the High Plains. 13.1.1 is now labeled as the AZ/NM Mountains. The Four Corners region is now considered the Arizona/New Mexico Plateau with a tiny sliver of Colorado Plateaus (10.1.6) wedged in along the CO border. 12.1.1 in the extreme southwest of the state is still Western Sierra Madre Piedmont.

Just considering the Sandia-Manzano Mountains behind the Albuquerque metro area, there's a lot going on that this ecoregion thingie misses. Anyone who has hiked the La Luz Trail can vouch for that. Similarly, hiking from Three Rivers Campground up to the top of Sierra Blanca takes you through a bewildering variety of life zones. What's going on here that the ecoregional model is missing?

2022

If 2021 felt like this...

 Then I have only hope that 2022 will be better... 

Meanwhile, Caro & I rang out the old and rang in the new with moules and baguettes (and Champaign).

All the leftover bread

As for the year of daily posts, I'm going to back off to weekly unless something momentous has happened.