Flora of Hidden Lake Drainage Basin, San Jacinto Mountain
Introduction
Location
Procedure For Compiling The Checklist
Important Caveat
Checklist
Introduction Hidden Lake is a vernal pool at San Jacinto Mountain at an elevation of about 8700 feet. The pool fills with water in spring in normal rainfall years, and then dries up during the summer. As the pool recedes, very specialized plants grown along the margins of the water.
This is a flora of the Hidden Lake Drainage Basin, compiled from vouchers and from our fieldwork. It includes species found in the Lake itself, as well as species found in the surrounding territory that drains to the Lake, an area of about 0.25 miles north-south and 0.20 miles east-west. The total area is about 0.05 square miles (=33 acres = 13.5 hectares). See the map below for the boundaries of the drainage basin.
So far, we have seen no non-native species in this area, and there is only a single voucher of one from here.
If you go to Hidden Lake, please do not trample the plant species along the margins of the Lake! Footprints from visitors can easily take a huge toll among these very specialized plants that live only here, by killing them directly by your boots and indirectly by changing the soil texture of their home. Staying away from the lake margins, and heading to Desert View on the well-established path, is the best way to respect the plants living here and allow them to continue to thrive in this special location. The plants are quite uniform around the entire lake, and hence you will see almost all the species by staying on the well-established path.
Location Hidden Lake is located 0.9 air miles south of the upper tram station, at the lower right corner of the following map. The dashed line shows the margins of the Hidden Lake Drainage Basin.
Procedure For Compiling The Checklist The Checklist was compiled from online vouchers, and from field work done by the authors on 25 June 2008 and on 21 August 2012.
The vouchers were obtained on 27 June 2008 and on 26 August 2017 from combining two searches on each date of the Consortium of California Herbaria, a search for Lake Surprise and a search for Hidden Lake. Only vouchers that appeared to be from the drainage area were kept; vouchers given with localities such as trail on way to Hidden Lake were ignored. A total of 62 taxa were vouchered.
The field work from 25 June 2008 and 21 August 2012 found 43 taxa, of which 26 were also in the voucher list.
The total list includes 79 taxa.
Important Caveat We have not looked at any of the vouchers yet, so we cannot vouch for their determinations. We have checked only the names of the taxa to make sure it was not unreasonable for them to occur here.
Checklist for Hidden Lake Drainage Basin Basic information about the checklist presentation and links:
- Notes on the Scientific Names Used At This Site and
- Information about the links from the Scientific Name and Common Name.
An asterisk before the Common Name indicates a non-native taxon.
There are three columns that follow the names for each taxa.
The first column (header #V) gives the number of vouchers found in the Hidden Lake Drainage Basin from the procedure detailed above.
The second column (header HL) denotes those taxa found within the margin of the highest waterline of the lake. There is some uncertainty about whether species known only from vouchers whose locality is just Hidden Lake were actually found within the lake margins or not. We've used our judgment as to which of those probably were found within the lake.
The third column (header #Pls) gives a rough estimate of the number of plants for taxa seen in our field surveys, with a maximum value of 99 plants. The main intent of this column is to indicate the species for which we found few plants.
Version for printing, without lines and other text on this page: html (3 pages) or pdf Clickbook booklet (1 double-sided page). (See printing instructions for an explanation of these options)
Voucher data provided by the participants of the Consortium of California Herbaria (ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/).
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Copyright © 2008-2017 by Tom Chester, Dave Stith, James Dillane, Michael Charters, and Eric Baecht
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://tchester.org/sb/plants/floras/hidden_lake.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 26 August 2017