San Jacinto Mountain Species in Bloom Above 6500 Feet Elevation: 2011

Species in Bloom On Each Trip

Introduction

This page reports the number of species seen in bloom above 6500 feet elevation on each hike at San Jacinto Mountain, along with our best-guess estimate of the total number of plants in bloom for each species.

It is important to note that these numbers were compiled only incidentally to our main botanical goals for each trip. Hence few of the numbers of plants in bloom come from actual counts, since we rarely made a point of actually surveying intently for how many plants of each species were in bloom.

Our procedure was to note each species in bloom when encountered for the first time. Most of the time, near the end of each hike, we make an estimate of how many plants we remembered seeing in bloom for each species. Sometimes, there isn't time to make those estimates during the hike, and they are made a day or two after the hike.

Although we generally end up with a pretty good idea of the number of plants we saw, especially when discussing it with each other at the time, there very well could have been more plants in bloom for some species that we didn't notice. Hence these numbers should in general be treated as minimum numbers of plants in bloom along our hiking routes.

No guessing, extrapolation, or interpolation was used; we only estimated the actual number of plants in bloom that we saw. For example, if our attention was diverted elsewhere at the only location of a species in bloom as we hiked by it, we did not count it as being seen in bloom. For example, in 2011, snow-plant was almost surely in bloom on the route we surveyed on 6/27, since some of the same plants were seen in bloom on that route on 6/22 and 7/1. But since somehow we missed seeing it in bloom that day, no numbers were reported for it in the table below.

I.e., the absence of a number in the table below does not necessarily mean no plants of that species were in bloom.

Number of Species and Plants in Bloom On Each Trip

Three plots are given below:

In Figures 1 and 3, data from just the Devils Slide Trail from 2006, the severe drought year of 2007, and from 2011 are plotted as well for comparison. Since not every trip in 2011 involved the Devils Slide Trail, the curve for 2011 has fewer points than the curve for 2007.

Note that the Devils Slide curves for 2011 follow the curves for 2007 almost exactly, with the main difference being a slight pause in the decline in the number of species in bloom in 2007, which was probably due to more extensive summer rainfall that year in August.

The plots and the table here must be interpreted cautiously, for at least two reasons:


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Copyright © 2011 by Tom Chester and Dave Stith.
Commercial rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce any or all of this page for individual or non-profit institutional internal use as long as credit is given to us at this source:
http://tchester.org/sj/blooms/2011.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Updated 16 October 2011 ("Allium cratericola" corrected to "Allium burlewii" on 28 November 2017).