Flora of Vallecito Hills Area, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Introduction This checklist is a start at a flora of the hills south of the Vallecito Stage Station, which we'll refer to as the Vallecito Hills here. See Fig. 1 for a map of the area.
Fig. 1. The Vallecito Hills Area. Field surveys are shown and labeled. Click on the map for a version showing a larger area.
The checklist was compiled from three field surveys and from vouchers. There were essentially no Calflora or iNaturalist observations in this area.
Field Surveys:
- 17 February 2012. A survey of the southwestern part by Tom Chester, Vince Balch, Mike Crouse, James Dillane and Kate Harper.
- 16 January 2016. A loop trip around the eastern two-thirds by Carla Hoegen and Fred Melgert. See Vallecito Loop for a map of their route and many pictures from that trip.
- 15 February 2018. A survey of the northwestern part by Tom Chester and Nancy Accola.
The main intent of the first and third survey was to try to find the Abutilon palmeri vouchered from Near base of hills south of Vallecito Stage Station on 30 April 1941. No survey has yet relocated those plants, and no one else has ever vouchered this species from this area. It is possible these were waifs from traffic to the Stage Station from Arizona.
Note on the Bromus ~carinatus from the surveys. On the first survey we found about 10 plants of a grass that we didn't recognize from the desert. The culms were all from last year, and very dead. They looked like those of an Achnatherum (now Stipa), with long glumes (9 and 13 mm) left on a robust stalk, but the plants did not look like S. parishii even though the leaves were 4 mm wide. The grass had at least four florets, with a lemma body of 15 mm and an awn of 5 mm, with 7 prominent veins. Nominally, this appears to be B. carinatus, but if the awn was broken off, it could be B. berteroanus. Interestingly, Larry Hendrickson collected vouchers determined as each of these species, with consecutive collection numbers, in Mason Valley, the next valley upstream from Vallecito Valley.
Vouchers. It is very difficult to pick out just the vouchers that were taken in the Vallecito Hills, since the vast majority of older vouchers just give the location as "Vallecitos" or similar. For example, some of Jepson's vouchers with a location of just "Vallecitos" were actually taken from the hills between Mason Valley and Vallecito Valley. See Jepson's field journal compared to the voucher locality online for some of his vouchers numbered 8620 to 8636, and, for example, his voucher #8628.
Worse, vouchers often just list the nearest locality to where they collected a voucher, so some of these vouchers could have been taken from miles away from our floral area.
We have attempted to toss the most obvious vouchers that are not in this locality using the following steps. We first searched for all georeferenced vouchers in the area from 32.95 to 32.98° north latitude and -116.37 to -116.32° east longitude. The localities were examined from each of those, and any that appeared to be from outside our area were tossed, including vouchers with vague localities such as Colorado Desert, east of Valecitos Stage Station and Colorado Desert, along old stage route.
The remaining vouchers were sorted by collection time, and sets of vouchers that appeared to be from elsewhere were tossed. For example, Woglum collected three vouchers of Bernardia incana, Calochotus concolor, and Muilla maritima, which no one else has seen in this area, and were probably collected farther south in The Potrero. Three vouchers by Bowers gave an elevation of 213 m and a locality of Vallecitos Creek, and were almost surely collected near the junction with Carrizo Creek.
Vouchers with only the locality of Vallecito, with no other clues that they might not be from here, were retained.
One voucher of Lupinus excubitus var. hallii was rejected as either a misdetermination or as being collected from outside this area, even though it was in the set of vouchers collected by Jepson in this area (this voucher was collected by Dutton during Jepson's trip and given to Jepson).
This procedure left 483 vouchers, which undoubtedly still contains species not actually present in the Vallecito Hills.
Checklist for Vallecito Hills Area See:
- 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 species.
The column #V is the number of vouchers for each taxon from the Consortium from the Vallecito Hills Area as defined above. Warning! Not all the vouchered species were actually taken from this area.
The column labeled #Pls gives a minimum estimate of the number of plants from our surveys. A FC in this column indicates a species observed by Fred Melgert and Carla Hoegen, for which no abundance estimate was made.
Version for printing, without other text on this page: html (7 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 © 2012-2018 by Tom Chester, Nancy Accola, Vince Balch, Mike Crouse, James Dillane, Kate Harper, Carla Hoegen, and Fred Melgert
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/vallecito_hills_area.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 19 February 2018