The Oasis, Fall 2022: News From the Mojave Desert Network

Mojave Desert Network staff at Toroweap, Grand Canyon National Park, on the way to Parashant National Monument. NPS / Mark Lehman.

About this issue

The Oasis is the twice-yearly newsletter of the Park Service's Mojave Desert Network (MOJN) Inventory and Monitoring Program. This issue: a column from program manager Allen Calvert, the network's first in-person science symposium in three years, a new brief on large springs monitoring, outreach in the parks, and staff news.

Program Manager's Corner

Allen Calvert, Mojave Desert Network program manager, with a bat caught in a mist net.

Calvert has led MOJN for more than 6 years. When he arrived at the network's modest trailer at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, new to the Park Service, the network was in transition: only three monitoring protocols were fully published, another was being put in place with its documents still in draft, one more was being planned — and all had to be drafted by the end of 2017. Two more protocols were being added, and the ecologist position had been vacant for years. He leaned hard on the team.

Running a network, he writes, is like captaining a sailing ship: your job is to steer, but it takes a team to turn the boat.

Physical scientist Jennifer Bailard measures a lake's level at Great Basin National Park with a digital level logger. NPS / Marisa Monroe.

• Protocols: all seven were published on time. He also found funding for a network-wide bat monitoring plan — coordinated with the parks and part of an established continent-wide program — now in its fifth year and funded through FY26.
• Improvements: across eight monitoring projects the team keeps refining its methods — measuring lake levels at Great Basin National Park with laser levels instead of strings, and moving most field data to electronic entry, for accuracy and speed.
• Extras for the parks: it will take years to analyze trends, but crews reaching remote places help in other ways — collecting bighorn sheep scat, checking cultural sites near monitored springs, and reporting non-native species such as burros and invasive plants.
• The pandemic: from March 2020, some data points were lost, which will delay some analyses, but crews got back into the field as fast as they safely could. The team adapted to virtual offices with weekly "coffee" breaks and brown-bag sessions, then hybrid schedules.
• Steering from afar: this past summer his wife began a PhD program in Binghamton, New York, so his family moved and he now works almost entirely remotely — feasible, he says, thanks to technology, pandemic practice and six years of teamwork. He will return as needed.

His closing mantra, cheesy but true: "Teamwork makes the dream work." Thanks to the MOJN Dream Team.

Second in-person science symposium

Marisa Monroe, physical science technician for the network's aquatic projects, speaks on macroinvertebrate communities in two large desert springs.

On November 2-3, 2022, about 80 people gathered in Boulder City, Nevada, for MOJN's second in-person symposium — the first since the inaugural one in 2019. They came from five federal agencies, three universities or colleges, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, a private botanical studies program, and four partner groups offering early-career work in parks.

• The program: 21 talks and four posters — restoration, paleontological inventory, wildlife monitoring and habitat modeling, invasive species, a climate change response program, desert springs, vegetation monitoring, and managing for soaring visitation, among others.
• From MOJN: five staff presented on desert springs, spring vegetation, spring macroinvertebrates and bats, and the new Inventory & Monitoring Division lead, Meg White, gave her early view of the national program.
• Materials: talks weren't recorded; see the abstracts and agenda.

Reviews were mostly favorable. Attendees valued learning the Mojave's unique challenges, seeing what colleagues are doing across the desert, the desert springs talks, renewed ties with the Pacific West Region and Washington Office, big efforts such as fire management, stream-bank restoration and climate planning, and the continuity of monitoring over decades.

New brief: large springs

Last summer MOJN published a project brief on its selected large springs monitoring: 15 large springs in six parks — Death Valley, Great Basin, Joshua Tree, Lake Mead, Mojave and Parashant — chosen with the parks for their highest, most reliable flow. Springs are ecologically vital and threatened by climate change, drought and land use, so the monitoring asks:

• Is the hydrology of any of these springs changing?
• Is their overall ecological condition changing?

More on the large springs monitoring page.

Outreach in the parks

MOJN ecologist Jeff Galvin (right) briefs BioBlitz participants before a field trip. NPS / Joseph Ladd.

Forest Health BioBlitz, Great Basin National Park. While monitoring white pines there in June, the vegetation crew joined the park's BioBlitz — an event that connects people to public lands, teaches about park resources and produces data for science. Vegetation ecologist Jeff Galvin explained how and why MOJN monitors white pine communities and shared early results, and he and biological science technician Joe Ladd led a field trip showing how white pine and aspen plots are sampled.

Physical scientist Jennifer Bailard at the Fossil Day "Bug Booth" of aquatic invertebrates. NPS / Marisa Monroe.

National Fossil Day, Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. In early October, the Pleistocene Palooza celebrated Tule Springs' Ice Age animals and environments and the science behind its fossil record. Jennifer Bailard and Marisa Monroe ran a popular Bug Booth of aquatic invertebrates for visitors of all ages, come to discover what remains of Ice Age Las Vegas.

Staff news

• Marisa Monroe was promoted in February to lead physical science technician for the aquatic projects — planning Desert Springs, Selected Large Springs and Streams and Lakes fieldwork, checking stream and lake hydrology data, and maintaining water-quality equipment.
• Sarah Wright, data scientist shared by MOJN and seven other networks, is on a detail from early October to early February with the division's Central Support Office, where she built an IMData Microsoft Team and a Data Science Hub SharePoint site for data practitioners, and has contributed to the NPS Dataverse R packages.
• Welcome, Katie and Hanna. Arriving in late October, they pitched in from snowy spring monitoring in Death Valley to the symposium. Katie Dagastino, physical science technician on all the water projects, holds a BA in Earth Sciences (geology), and began with the Park Service in 2016 as a seasonal interpretive ranger at Oregon Caves before work in recreation, endangered species, water quality, conservation and wildland firefighting. Hanna Buccowich, hydrology assistant through the Conservation Legacy internship program, holds a BS in Biology and has monitored desert tortoises in the Mojave and mapped invasive species on burn sites in the Klamath and Shasta-Trinity National Forests.
• Farewell, Sarah, Ashley, Gabriel and Natalie. Sarah Barsch (Great Basin Institute) and Ashley O'Brien (Conservation Legacy) worked on bat monitoring, hauling equipment and collecting acoustic and capture data; Gabriel Elliott (Great Basin Institute) and Natalie Kim (Conservation Legacy) worked on vegetation projects, from desert shrublands to subalpine white pines. Happy trails!

Ashley O'Brien (left) and Sarah Barsch set up acoustic bat monitors in Mojave National Preserve. NPS / Kimber Godfrey.

Natalie Kim, Gabriel Elliott, Ashley O'Brien and biological science technician Joseph Ladd after finishing the season's white pine plots in Great Basin National Park. NPS / Joseph Ladd.

An intern's season

Sierra Moore collects data at Pakoon Spring, Parashant National Monument, for quarterly large-springs monitoring.

Sierra Moore, a Wildlife Conservation student at Virginia Tech, joined as a data assistant through the Scientists-in-Parks program in June and left on December 2nd, having helped with data projects, fieldwork and the symposium. Her work included:

• electronic field forms in Survey123, saving time and cutting errors;
• moving a database from SQL Server to ArcGIS Online, for a smoother flow from field to managed data;
• dashboards that let the hydrology team explore Desert Springs data;
• updating an R package for quality control of Desert Springs data.

She gained new software, programming and data-management skills, learned about vital signs monitoring in the field, and leaves grateful for the connections she made.

Field schedule, fall and winter

Sources

Based on "The Oasis Newsletter: Fall 2022," prepared by Linda Mutch and Lise Grace, Mojave Desert Inventory & Monitoring Network, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The newsletter's logos, a GIPHY animation, the brief's cover image and staff members' personal portraits are not reproduced.