Flora of the Western Old Kane Spring Road Area, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
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| Fig. 1. View to the northwest showing the Old Kane Spring Road area on 20 February 2018, by Tom Chester. Click on the photograph for a larger version. |
Introduction
This is a start at the flora of the Old Kane Spring Road Area; see Figs. 1 and 2. This area is not tightly defined, since most of it has not been surveyed for plant species yet. From Fig. 2, which shows where species have been recorded, the checklist is most representative of the west end of Old Kane Spring Road, a portion of the area to the south, and the area along SR78 between its junction with Old Kane Spring Road to its junction with Borrego Springs Road. This flora does not include species in the San Felipe Wash.
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| Fig. 2. Map showing the western part of the Old Kane Spring Road area, along with locations where species have been recorded in our observations, vouchers, and iNaturalist observations. The areas of San Felipe Wash, The Narrows, Harper Canyon and Borrego Mountain are outside of this floral area. Click on the map for a version showing a larger area, without labels. |
There are separate floras for The Narrows area on the west; Borrego Mountain on the north; and Harper Canyon to the south.
This area is dominated by an old alluvial plain which is being dissected; see Fig. 1. The ridges and canyons in the area we surveyed appear to be in similar rocks, but are probably of the Canebrake Conglomerate, a much older alluvial deposit. The photograph in Fig. 1 was taken from one of those ridges, which is in the foreground at bottom in the photograph.
This habitat excludes species that like to grow on granitic or metamorphic rock, or on slopes made from those exposures. Very little of the habitat here is of sand, so species that like to grow in sandy areas are sparse here.
The flora has been compiled from the following sources:
- One Field Trip on 20 February 2018, in a very dry year where no annuals had germinated here, by Tom Chester, Nancy Accola, Walt Fidler, and Don Rideout. We found 62 species, of which 61 were noted in the checklist below. The other species was one or more widespread and abundant Chaenactis species that could not be identified from its dead remnants from last year.
- Vouchers. Georeferenced vouchers were searched on 21 February 2018 for the area defined by 33.12 to 33.16° N. latitude and -116.27 to -116.22° E. longitude. The localities were reviewed, and vouchers with location in the San Felipe Wash or Harper Canyon, or with ambiguous localities such as "E of Narrows" were tossed.
One voucher from 1935 has a locality that sounds like it should be in this area, of Kane Spring Road beyond Narrows, but it is of Xylorhiza orcuttii which is very unlikely to grow in at least this western part of Kane Spring Road. It even seems unlikely that it grows in the eastern part of Kane Spring Road since Fred Melgert and Carla Hoegen's in-depth surveys for this species show the closest known plants are on the northwest side of the West Butte of Borrego Mountain and near Split Mountain. It is possible that the collector took what is now called Split Mountain Road from that part of Kane Spring Road and went to the Split Mountain location, and gave just the vague locality on the voucher. So we tossed this voucher as well.
The above procedure left 119 vouchers from this area. Table 1 lists the dominant collectors.
Table 1. Top Voucher Collectors in This Area
# Vouchers Collectors 41 C. L. Hitchcock 21 Larry Hendrickson, Bonnie Bruce 17 Bill Sullivan 11 Arthur Morley, Jean Morley 10 Joe Barth One species vouchered from 1962, Lepidium densiflorum, with duplicate vouchers at CAS and RSA, from State Highway 78, 0.7 mile west of the east entrance to Anza-Borrego State Park, is quite unexpected here. The determination was made by the Jepson Manual Second Edition author, Ihsan A. Al-Shehbaz, in 2010 for the CAS duplicate, yet he gives only SCo, DMoj in southern California for this species. It seems highly likely that if this location is correct, this is a waif, possibly from traffic to Ocotillo Wells from the coast, since no one else has ever seen this species in our desert.
- iNaturalist was searched on 21 February 2018 for taxa not found in the field trip or in vouchers. Three additional taxa were found.
- Calflora was searched on 21 February 2018 for this area, but there was only a single observation georeferenced here, which turned out to be both misdetermined and misgeoreferenced; see the comments on this record.
The resulting checklist contained a total of 94 taxa.
Since this checklist is almost surely quite incomplete for annuals and some perennials, we went through the checklists for The Narrows area and Harper Canyon, and the vouchers which were just outside this area, and included 45 species we thought could potentially be found here. Those species are noted in the checklist by having no entries in the last two columns.
Checklist for Old Kane Spring Road Area
See:
- Notes on the Scientific Names Used At This Site and
- Information about the links from the Scientific Name and Common Name.
The column with header Fam is the first three letter of the Jepson Manual Second Edition family. See Plant Family Abbreviations for most of them.
An asterisk before the common name indicates a non-native species.
The column labeled #V gives the number of vouchers from this area.
The column labeled #Pls gives a minimum estimate of the number of plants from our single survey in a dry year. An entry of iNat in this column indicates a species from iNaturalist whose determination was reviewed by us.
Taxa with no entry in the last two columns are species that potentially could be here, but so far have not been observed here.
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Voucher data provided by the participants of the Consortium of California Herbaria (ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/)