Flora of The Narrows Area, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Introduction Fig. 1. The Narrows area. The black lines show the northern and western boundaries for the voucher search. The solid blue lines show the area surveyed on 28 December 2014. The solid red loop shows the area surveyed on 2 February 2014. The solid green lines show the area surveyed on 3 January 2015. ![]()
This checklist is compiled from vouchers with coordinates taken in a the area surrounding The Narrows, along with a list of plants compiled from three surveys on 2 February 2014, 28 December 2014, and 3 January 2015, all done in a very dry year.
The vouchers come from a geographic coordinate area search on 4 January 2014 of the Consortium of California Herbaria.
The Consortium records were searched for vouchers with coordinates between 33.10 and 33.14° N. Latitude, and -116.32 and -116.27 E. Longitude. The search box is shown in Fig. 1 as the rectangle made from black arrowed lines. This search returned 241 vouchers of 113 taxa after tossing ones not in the target area (9 vouchers) or ones judged to be probably misdetermined as well as probably not in the target area (1, UC486382).
Table 1 gives the dominant collectors, those with 19 or more vouchers. No other collector had more than 8 vouchers.
Table 1. Dominant Collectors for The Narrows Area
# Vouchers Collector 51 Carl V. Meyer 43 Bonnie C. Templeton 30 Frank F. Gander 27 W. L. Jepson 19 N. C. Cooper We couldn't find any biographical information online about Carl V. Meyer or N.C. Cooper.
Bonnie Templeton was the Curator of Botany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History from 1929 to 1970, and was an on-call forensic botanist for the L.A. Police Department.
Frank Gander was the Curator of Botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1935 to 1942.
Willis Linn Jepson was of course the first premier botanist of California.
Vouchers were collected in this area from 1920 to 2010, with 85% collected in 1920 to 1949, with only 26 vouchers (11%) collected in 2001 to 2010.
The trip on 2 February 2014 was a loop in Powder Dump Wash / Quartz Vein Wash, done primarily to map the Tiquilia canescens population here. We also recorded all the species we saw, which totaled 63. The area appeared very dry and drought-stressed during this survey, so nearly all annuals and perennials are missing from this field survey.
The trip on 28 December 2014 was also done to search for Tiquilia canescens in what appeared to be possible habitat for it near the south base of southeast Yaqui Ridge. No plants of that species were found. Just 51 species were recorded on that trip, which also surveyed a portion of San Felipe Creek.
The trip on 3 January 2015 was also done to search for Tiquilia canescens in what appeared to be possible habitat for it in The Narrows itself, and in the same rocks in Nude Wash where it was found in Quartz Vein Wash. However, no plants of that species were found. 74 species were recorded on that trip.
The final checklist for this area contains a total of 155 taxa. Of these 155 taxa, 62 are only from vouchers; 51 are from both our survey and vouchers; and 42 are only from our survey. Many of the vouchered species not seen in our survey are annuals not present in this dry year.
Judging from our survey alone, where only a bit more than half the species we found had vouchers from this area, it is likely that a checklist compiled only from these vouchers and from our three surveys in a depauperate year is highly incomplete.
Checklist for The Narrows Area See Information about the order in which the species are presented, and the links from the Scientific Name and Common Name.
The column #V is the number of vouchers for each taxon from the Consortium, with a maximum value of 9.
The column #Pl gives the number of plants observed in our two surveys. The column YR is for the Yaqui Ridge survey on 28 December 2014; the column PD is for the Powder Dump Wash / Quartz Vein Wash survey on 2 February 2014; and the column TN is for the survey through The Narrows, up into Cactus Valley, and then up a bit of Nude Wash. All three surveys were done in very dry conditions.
Note that most annuals and many perennials are missing from the field surveys, due to the lack of surveys at prime time in a good rainfall year.
Version for printing, without lines and other text on this page: html (5 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 © 2014-2015 by Tom Chester, Keir Morse, Kate Harper, Adrienne Ballwey, Nancy Accola, Frank Harris, Mike Crouse, and Jim Roberts.
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/narrows_area.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 6 January 2015