Researchers spent a summer at Trout Creek Ranch and their findings are helping with our conservation planning on this large site. They also found friendship, peace of mind and an experience that will stay with them forever.
A summer in the mountains sounds inviting to many. Wide open vistas, wildlife sightings and seclusion can draw people in. Two graduate students from the University of Vermont’s Plant Biology Department came for all three in 2022. Through a partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Hayley Kolding and Dylan O’Leary had a short stay at Trout Creek Ranch, but have helped it for years to come.
The project scale enticed them both. From the ranch lowlands, and up into the surrounding Trout Creek and Pueblo Mountains, ODLT’s private land holdings within the project area span nearly 17,000 acres. Hayley felt it was unlike anything she’d worked with on the east coast and recalled her initial thoughts.
“It would be a new flora, it would be a whole new set of wildlife, the geography would be different, the culture would be different, the geographic scale would be huge and the implications felt really far-reaching and important, so, I thought, ‘I’m in.’ It would mean biting off way more than I knew I could chew, and that made it feel really important to try,” Hayley shared.
Hayley assessed aquatic areas to determine priorities for management and restoration projects. Two focal points were to identify areas that could benefit the most through low investments of time and resources, and to also streamline existing habitat assessment methods that could be used throughout the property and beyond.
In two months, Hayley surveyed 125 springs or wet meadows and 16 creeks. She also participated in field days with Oregon State University’s Extension Service and Trout Unlimited to practice riparian assessment. Habitat conditions were documented to identify where impacts on plants could lead to drained floodplains, lowered water tables, incised channels, and excessive evaporative water loss.
“I looked a lot at channel morphology — the structure of the creek channel, bed, and banks. At every site, I was taking notes on the plants that were growing, the hydrology, and any evidence of disturbance. Bringing it all together, you get a quick diagnosis of how important that site is to the ranch — for wildlife and people and cattle — and also of how urgent and how feasible it might be to restore that site,” Hayley explained.
This helped sort sites into where management changes are most ecologically important and practical for the future. Ecosystems that depend on groundwater were at the top of the list because they are predicted to be more resilient to a changing climate. These included both springs and creeks where the flow depends on ground water sources or springs, and not just surface water or precipitation.
Hayley knows how people value creeks and springs, particularly in the desert, and feels that continuing to understand those ecological processes will further benefit the people who live on, use and work the land.
Both Hayley and Dylan used spatial data, or any data that contains information about a specific location. For Hayley, the remote sensing data provided annual projections of which areas tend to be the greenest or most moist during the late growing season. Dylan’s efforts helped develop these data and also assess its accuracy for management planning.
“My project is really devoted to testing and developing new ways to take these spatial tools and turn them directly into action, or at least into priorities that can lead to action,” shared Dylan.
Dylan’s goal was to develop, test, and fine tune methods for assessing current trends in vegetation and prioritizing upland grassland and shrubland restoration at Trout Creek Ranch. This large-scale site presented an opportunity to combine and test the most contemporary spatial products, techniques, and strategies to both screen and diagnose the ecosystems at a ranch setting, which represents typical restoration needs and challenges across the Great Basin. One of the study outcomes could show where different types of grasses are located and if areas are shifting from native perennial grasses to annual invasive grasses that negatively contribute to changes in natural fire regimes.
Dylan surveyed 500 points of interest using two different methods. The first included positioning a fiberglass rod at 157 random points in different elevations and documenting the amounts and varieties of both vegetation and ground cover that it touched. These values will be used to assess current trends and the accuracy of current spatial products, which in turn, will facilitate the development of a prioritization plan for restoration across Trout Creek Ranch.
There were some discrepancies between what previous data expected to be found in these areas versus what was actually there. This had Dylan design a rapid survey of 343 transect-style survey points in four regions considered “the best of the best” to detect vegetation transitions at a finer resolution, and to test the accuracy of the spatial tools used in assessing the highest restoration potential. This ground truthing determines how reliable the tools are by cross checking what’s really there. Dylan noted that it’s basically plugging the solution back into the equation that created the mapping products that we have now, to see how accurate they actually are.
This feeds into Dylan’s enjoyment of wrangling with problems that no one has answers to yet. He is eager to work with the Nature Conservancy to dissect this other side of analysis and hopes that the Intermountain West community can benefit from it. “I’d love to see folks add to it and to just keep using it, for whatever it’s worth, to go in the right direction to help make these tools even better than they are,” Dylan envisioned.
When they were back in Vermont the following winter, reflections of the sights and sounds and weather came easily. “That landscape is so different from the forest out here,” recalled Dylan. “It’s just such a different dynamic to have a landscape without trees, but also to see the same amount of complexity, if not more. It’s just teeming with life.”
What they missed couldn’t fully be named. It came out in blended memories and lists of joy. Both instantly recalled the lizards (sadly) absent from Vermont. There were long, bumpy dusty rides into every field site, the smell of sage when it rained, the shape of rocks, the brilliance of wildflowers existing beneath gravel and the kindness from strangers.
Hayley described the pleasure of being on her belly in a floodplain to identify plant parts, and how it could be so hot and dry but then she’d step into a creek that was cold enough to make her bones hurt. They both missed the plants, the wildlife, the people and the landscape itself, and this transformational experience that put them in a new place with new opportunities.
Though their research was on quantifying things, how they feel about the area is beyond measure. “My summer was just going out to places like this, and wandering. Oh my goodness. What a life,” beamed Dylan. “That time was potentially the happiest two months of my life,” Hayley reflected. A summer in the mountains can have a lasting impact on anyone. For Dylan and Hayley, it is a step on their path of lifelong interpretation and conservation.
Feature image of Pueblo Mountain in summer — Dylan O’Leary
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These resources assisted Dylan’s studies:
- The SageCon Invasives Initiative uses a shared geographic strategy for proactive landscape-scale management of invasive grasses in southeastern Oregon. It helped begin the prioritization process and determined where to sample points.
- Rangeland Analysis Platform data was also used to compare observed vegetation cover.
Discover details of the highlighted region:
