Plant Checklist for Whitewater River Canyon, Riverside County portion, San Bernardino Mountains
Introduction This is a flora of the Riverside County portion of the Whitewater River Area, including the PCT Section C2 from Cottonwood Canyon to Whitewater Canyon, since that section of the PCT travels into Whitewater Canyon. For this flora, we excluded the upper part of Whitewater Canyon that is in San Bernardino County, since all of our botanical trips in this area have stayed within Riverside County.
In contrast to the other floras of Whitewater Canyon area we've placed online, this is a more tightly-focused flora of species that we are quite confident actually occur in the Whitewater Canyon area. The main development that made this possible was the Whitewater Bioblitz of April 12-13, 2010, and the team of volunteers from the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden, along with additional volunteers, who took a whopping 709 vouchers in the Riverside County portion of Whitewater Canyon, along with additional vouchers in the San Bernardino County portion.
The problem in compiling a reliable flora of Whitewater Canyon had been that older vouchers with a locality of just Whitewater may or may not have been taken from Whitewater Canyon. Often, older vouchers just cite the nearest known-at-that-time location, even though the vouchers might have been taken miles away from that location.
Those 709 vouchers from the Bioblitz document a large number of species that actually occur here, and so, along with our surveys and additional vouchers taken since 2010, give a reliable set of species for this flora.
Thus for this flora, we have ignored species that were only vouchered before 2010 and that were not seen in our surveys. A careful examination of the pre-2010 vouchers would probably result in the addition of some species to this flora, but we haven't had time to do that examination yet.
This flora contains 349 taxa, compared to 524 species for a flora that included all of the pre-2010 vouchers which almost surely contained a number of species not actually found in Whitewater Canyon.
Of those 349 taxa, 263 were in the vouchers taken in 2010 and later, and 86 were added from our surveys. Of those 86, 44 have vouchers taken prior to 2010, 33 were found in Whitewater Canyon only by our field work, and 9 were only from the PCT Section C2, which may or may not occur in the Whitewater Canyon drainage area.
Pictures of some of the species from surveys by Michael Charters are here: February 2009; April 2009 Part One; April 2009 Part Two; and 18 March 2010.
Checklist for Whitewater River Canyon 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.
The column with header #V gives the number of vouchers in this area, truncated at 9, including the pre- and post-2010 vouchers.
The column with header #Pls gives the minimum number of plants we have seen, from all of our surveys here, up to a maximum of 99 plants. Some species seen only by Michael Charters or RT Hawke are noted by MC or RT in this column, since no estimate of abundances was made for those species. Species found only on the PCT north of Cottonwood Canyon (Section C2) are noted by C2 in this column.
Two taxa in the checklist below are uncertain:
- The Pentagramma triangularis ssp. maxonii in Michael Charters' picture looks like it has stalked glands on the leaf upper surface, but it is hard to be sure without a higher resolution photograph. If it is not ssp. maxonii, then it is ssp. triangularis.
- The Gutierrezia californica that has been vouchered here, and the Gutierrezia plants we have observed, may in fact be G. sarothrae, since it is difficult to distinguish those two species without detailed measurements from a large number of different plants.
Version for printing, without lines and other text on this page: html (8 pages) or pdf Clickbook booklet (2 double-sided pages). (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 © 2017 by Tom Chester, Michael Charters, RT Hawke, Shaun Hawke, Keir Morse, Nancy Accola, Adrienne Ballwey, Dave Stith, Tracy Albrecht, Mike Crouse, and Vince Balch.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to us at this source:
http://tchester.org/sb/plants/floras/whitewater_riverside_county.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 10 January 2018