Flora of the Agua Caliente County Park Area
Introduction This page is out of date! For the latest flora of the Agua Caliente County Park Area and the surrounding area, see Flora of North Sawtooth and Tierra Blanca Mountains, which contains a column indicating whether a taxon is in the County Park Area.
Stay tuned for the list of just the Agua Caliente Park Area itself, which will be put here.
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This checklist is a start at a true flora of the Agua Caliente County Park Area and the surrounding area within about 1.5 miles. It has been compiled from three sources: a plant checklist available at the Park; surveys by the authors; and online vouchers.
The Park Plant Checklist
We obtained a checklist from the Park on 1 January 2006, which was the motivation for starting work on the flora here. The checklist has no author name, its title is Blooming Flowers - APRIL 5, 2000, and it is organized by color. The checklist contains some species not likely to have been blooming in April, such as Pectis papposa, and so may have been updated by other people since the stated date.
The left hand column of the checklist has both common and scientific names, but the right hand column has just common names.
The checklist appears to have been compiled by someone not familiar with the southern California flora, since it contains names of some species not known from San Diego County, such as Mammillaria microcarpa, Agave parryi, Dithyrea wislizeni, Argemone pleicantha, and Cordylanthus wrightii (some of these species were guesses made from the common name). Other names are of taxa only known from the coastal side of the mountains in San Diego County.
We have updated the names on the checklist using our best guess as to the actual species, helped by our own observations and by vouchers. We have removed the most improbable species, but have retained some improbable species that might be present here for which we could think of no alternative determination. For example, Stanleya pinnata appears on the list, which is only known from a single location in extreme northern San Diego County in Rockhouse Canyon. Species like that, with no voucher present in the Agua Caliente area, should be treated with caution.
Voucher Records
Vouchers, of course, are the most reliable record of the taxa present here, since a voucher is a specimen stored in a herbarium that can be reviewed by an expert. However, a checklist compiled solely from vouchers is almost always significantly incomplete, unless someone has made an intensive effort to collect all species in an area.
The vouchers come from a search on 22 December 2009 of the Consortium of California Herbaria.
The Consortium records were searched for vouchers with coordinates between 33.928 and 33.971° N. Latitude, and -116.26 and -116.342 E. Longitude. Localities of those vouchers were examined, and additional searches were made to find ones in San Diego County from those localities, including Agua Caliente; Moonlight; Squaw Canyon; and Tierra Blanca. The detailed localities of those vouchers were examined and ones not definitely in the target area were eliminated. In practice, that eliminated all additional vouchers except for ones containing the words Agua Caliente.
191 vouchers were found of 120 taxa. The voucher locations are shown in the following map:
See also a map showing a larger area.
Four sets of collectors were responsible for 91 (48%) of those vouchers:
# Vouchers Collector 30 Mike D. Angel 21 Mike D. Angel, John DeWald 20 Duffie Clemons, Erik Jonsson 20 Mike D. Angel, Max Angel Clearly, Mike D. Angel is the supreme collector of this area, being part of the group collecting 71 (37%) of all vouchers in this area.
In addition, we have included some species with nearby vouchers that might turn out to be found here. Those species are identified separately in the flora below.
Our Surveys
We surveyed the Moonlight Canyon Trail twice in January 2007, finding 88 taxa.
In addition, James surveyed other areas of the County Park on several days, finding additional taxa for the flora.
Number of Species in the Combined Checklist
The combined checklist contains 237 taxa, although some of the entries from the Park Checklist may be misdeterminations of other species on the list. A few other entries are of the species, even though subspecies are given, since it is possible that the voucher of the species might be of a different subspecies than the one in the list.
Checklist for the Agua Caliente County Park Area This page is out of date! For the latest flora of the Agua Caliente County Park Area and the surrounding area, see Flora of North Sawtooth and Tierra Blanca Mountains, which contains a column indicating whether a taxon is in the County Park Area.
Voucher data provided by the participants of the Consortium of California Herbaria (ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/)
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Copyright © 2009-2012 by James Dillane and Tom Chester.
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/sd/plants/floras/agua_caliente.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 26 March 2012