S6 E02 Botany

As soon as all the cars stopped, everyone piled out and people were instantly on the ground crouched over tiny plants.

Transcript:

Alan: There’s a very round globular leaf form. What is this form? It’s round ball. The whole string of beads as the leaves. We better collect this as well. We might have a new species or a subspecies, or a variety. It’s exciting. The next day we found another one in between that, not round, not gray, lots of it, a different one.

It’s an intermediate one. How variable is this thing? Anyway. Exciting. 

Allie Narrating: Welcome to Saltgrass. My name’s Allie and that was Alan Bedggood, the leader of the Botany Team on Desert Discovery, talking enthusiastically about a plant they had found on one of the days out in the Yeo Lake project.

In this episode we’re going to head out with the Botany Team for a day and see what a day of data collection for them looks like.

 They were the first team I joined out on Desert Discovery. My very first day on site I jumped in one of their cars and ran with them for the day. Nate and I had just spent eight days driving across Australia from Victoria to Western Australia, and then up to the site and if you want to know more about what that drive was like, I’ve created a Substack post describing that and I have me reading it as well as the words, if you wanted to find out a bit more about what it’s like to drive across Australia.

I think what I’m gonna do is keep some of that sort of stuff, my more personal, experiences and reflections and put them on Substack. I’m only just starting a Substack, so I don’t know if it will fly or not, but we’re gonna give it a shot for this season and, I’ll flag that and point you towards it. There’ll be a link to the Substack in the bottom of the show notes, yeah, check it out. And in the meantime, that means we get to focus on the Botany Team more this episode and I think there were a really great introduction to what Desert Discovery does and how they do it.

Saltgrass theme music and standard episode intro:

A couple of years ago, my partner and I drove three and a half thousand kilometers from our home in Castlemaine, Victoria, across the Nullarbor and into the remote deserts of Western Australia. Our destination was a place called Yeo Lake Nature Reserve to join a citizen science group called Desert Discovery.

For two weeks we camped with them and each day was an adventure to see what life is out there in the desert. A treasure hunt for rare and obscure species. I took along my sound recorder and went on a treasure hunt of my own for stories about who these people were and why they were doing this. Season six of Saltgrass is still about salt of the earth people and grassroots change.

It’s just a bit further from home.

You can hear all episodes of Saltgrass on your podcast app or at saltgrasspodcast.com. Saltgrass is produced on Djaara Country, home of the Dja Dja Wurrung. Yeo Lake Nature Reserve is on central desert country where the Yuka people, the Sullivan and Edwards families, and the Ngaanyatjarra and Nangaanya Ku peoples have walked for thousands of years.

Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Allie Narrating: So after our eight days of driving we got to base camp at Yeo Lake Nature Reserve in time for lunch and we set up our camp and relaxed a bit. That night there was talks; an introduction, health and safety briefing, and all of the team leaders got up to talk about what their team would be doing. So there’s a bird team, mammals and reptiles team, botany, fungi, entomology, which is insects or invertebrates, moles and tracks and scats. All of those teams we are going to have a chat in the coming episodes. And it was 11 o’clock at night before we actually went to bed on that first night in camp.

And the next morning it was all go.

The teams had started and my first stop was with the Botany Team.

Nate and I had spent a lot of time together on that drive over; eight days just in the car with each other all day. So I did not choose to go with his team on the first day. I found myself some friends, and I had actually met Alan, who’s the leader of the Botany Team before when we were at Ned’s Corner at a little DD get together up there one time. I had a great chat with him because he’s an expert on grasses and I was quizzing him about saltgrass as an actual plant, not, you know, this show. And I really wanted to know what the plant that I’d named the show after was all about and he was very happy to oblige and so we’d already had a good chat.

So he was my first choice to approach as I got to know everyone else in camp. He was someone who I’d already met. The day, started relatively early, but at a civilized time and everyone gathered near where Alan had camped as he was the team leader, and quite a few of the botany people had camped together, so that was convenient.

Nate had left quite early that morning with the mammals and reptiles team, and what that meant was that I was awake and I wandered over to where the botany team was meeting and sat and chatted to them as they had their breakfasts.

Maree: I think it’s gonna be a reasonable day. 

DD participant: You haven’t got a specimen jar?

I’ve looked that up before. Tiny little spider under there.

Allie Narrating: I was talking to Maree when someone asked for a specimen jar because they’d seen a spider we hadn’t even started the day and people were already collecting things.

Allie: Everything. Everything we see, people are like, ‘get it!’ 

Maree: Well, it could be pretty rare out here, so we’ve gotta get it. 

Allie: Yeah, I guess we got another hour before we go.

Maree: Don’t get too excited. We’re not speedy. 

Allie: (Laughter) 

Maree: We’re on a holiday too. 

Allie: Just relax, the plants aren’t going anywhere. 

Maree: That’s right. That’s what I’m saying. 

Allie: The mammals team, sure, they need to run hard. 

Maree: That’s right. But we don’t. So my gosh, I’m thrilled that I’m in botany. (laughter)

Allie Narrating: This is Maree Goods. She’s here with her husband Graham, and, they were the originators of the Botany Team back in the day. Alan Bedggood is now the team leader, but Maree was the team leader for a while there. So I took the opportunity over breakfast of quizzing her a little bit about how the botany team works and how collecting data works.

Maree: And the thing is with this, we don’t even have to know the names of the plants ’cause that’s up to the herbarium. 

Allie: Okay. We just need to get samples

Maree: We do try to give, get it a genus. Yeah. And as much detail as we can. Alan’s got data books that we fill out the sheets and for each plant. 

Allie: That makes life a lot easier doesn’t it?

Maree: Mm-hmm. They like us to have a go.

Allie: And do they want us to like estimate numbers or is it just, there is some here and that’s all the data they need. 

Maree: The herbarium, all they’re interested in is specimens. 

Allie: It’s not like ‘this is a forest of mulga’ rather than one tree.

Maree: Well, on each data sheet it’ll ask you what’s the surrounding vegetation. Okay. So you can say mulga or mallee or accacia wood land. That sort of thing. 

Allie: It’s a little bit of context. 

Maree: Yeah. Yeah. and the soil type, so yes, I suppose, yes, is answer to your question. Yeah. 

Allie Narrating: Gradually, more and more people started arriving at the site and joining us around the little fire they had going. Then when it was time to go and most of the people were there, Alan started the day with a bit of an explainer because it was the first day on camp. He needed to explain to people the process and there were a few newbies in the group. There were a couple of new folk who joined Desert Discovery there were three students there, who basically stuck with the botany team for most of the trip and myself, and so even though there were many well experienced Desert Discovery Botany Team members standing around knowing exactly what he was talking about, it was great for us to hear exactly what the process would be and why.

Alan: What we are planning on doing is getting a survey of anything that’s here that’s suitable for herbarium specimens. So they have to be able to identify the plant from the specimen we get. So importance of flowers and fruit to leaves and perhaps a whole plant if they’re small enough for a whole plant.

Now, if you haven’t got flowers and fruits, it’s really hard to identify and it’s not worth collecting. You can’t go around and just take snippets of these acacias or some of the hakea all I’ll get, it’s a hakea, all I’ll get is it’s an acacia.

The process is we are gonna drive along til, well, either I stop or someone said, ‘Alan you missed this one here. Come back over for this one.’ So we’ll stop and collect what’s there. We’re gonna go through chenopod flats where there’s some plants right in the middle. What I’ll do is stop and put a water bottle beside it and I’ll drive forward a couple of cars and then we can stop and collect those. There’s three species there to collect and there’s a couple more around and there’s chenopods around, so we might stay there for half an hour or an hour, whatever. Then we’ll drive up and there’s, there’s a few other places we can stop. There’s some sandhills on the side, we’ll stop and have a look at. Not the big ones you saw driving in, but there’s some others. We’re gonna drive down a semi lake bed, creek bed flat, a flat gibbery sort of spot, and then come to a nice amphitheater of wall around with, uh, buttresses and eucalypts and all sort of stuff in there.

It’s gonna be nice. And apparently we can drive around and go up on top, but I didn’t get that far. So that’s the goal for today. We have the field book to fill out, and we’ve got GPS requirements, descriptions of topography, soils, plant associations and stuff. So someone’s busily scribing and so look over your shoulder what’s the next thing to write down? Okay. So the faster we can get that field book filled out, the faster we move on to the next species or back in the car. When we stop people scan around ‘Oh we found something here. I found something there. I found something here’ which is great. Put a bit of flagging tape on it or a stick or standby it until we come to you.

Whatever. And don’t go too far away from the car. Mark tends to wander off ‘Oh, there’s something over here. And there’s something over here. I dunno what it is, but this is something over here’. So that’s good. That’s good. So that’s how we’re gonna find stuff. So after we do the recording, is we. Are we taking photographs?

Are you taking photographs? 

DD participant: Yeah. 

Alan: Lovely. Thank you. So we’re taking photographs and this is a specimen we want, so don’t cut it and put it into plant press because we gotta get the photographs. So we find it, photograph it, record everything, and then the press is coming afterwards and or someone picks it up, takes it to the plant, press, we press it, pick up and move on. Or get the next one. 

Mal: Final request. Any fungi you see on the way, wherever they might be, just flag them for me if you would. 

Alan: Flag it? We’ll come and get it. Don’t pick it.

Allie: Don’t touch it. 

Mal: Don’t touch it. (ferociously) (laughter)

Maree: And Graham and I have got a little vial with alcohol in it, so if anybody sees any spiders, we can fill that little thing up with spiders. 

Allie Narrating: So already you can hear how different teams are supporting each other in collecting things. So Mal spoke just before about people keeping their eye open for fungi, and Maree was saying that she had a little vial with some alcohol in it for any insect or arachnid findings that people had that they could share with the entomology or invertebrates team.

And then Alan’s about to open up for questions and you’re going to hear a few people. So, someone curious about how much the knowledge is shared, and Alan quickly assures her that it’s completely public and everything they collect is open for anyone to look at. And then there are a group of three university students who have joined us. You heard Ruby in the first episode talking about the desert being Australia’s largest biome, and she brings up the topic of iNaturalist, which is an amazing citizen science tool. It’s an app where people can take photos of things they’ve found in nature, upload it with a GPS and a time and a date, and all of that stuff, and it can be verified by experts.

And then it becomes this massive database of what is where right across the world. So all of the university students were keen on iNaturalist as a tool, and it seems like whatever project they’re on, they’re not only collecting data for the project, but they’re also encouraged to upload it to iNaturalist.

And we’re gonna talk about iNaturalist with them later on. So we’ll go into more depth about that. But I just wanted to tell you what it was as they start talking about it. So you’re gonna hear Ruby and also Thomas, who is one of the students on the trip. 

Alan: Any, any questions? Yeah. 

DD participant: I wanted to ask if we find anything that’s threatened or priority, are we able to share those coordinates and then we can put on the database? 

Alan: All this data?

DD participant: Yep. 

Alan: Goes to the herbarium. Everything we’ve got goes to the herbarium.

DD participant: Oh, fantastic. Yep. 

Alan: We, we are collecting for the herbarium and we’ve got our threatened species permit to be able to collect. The threatened and endangered species. Yeah. Trouble is, I dunno what it is. Yeah. Is that a threatened and endangered one or not a threatened, endangered one.

We’re not gonna know. So by getting that permit we can collect anything. 

DD participant: Yeah. Cool. That sounds great. 

Alan: We are working with the herbarium and Bevin is working with the museum. 

And the Linda’s working with Birds Australia. So it’s all citizen science. 

Ruby: So is it possible then to do paired like iNaturalist records of each specimen collected?

I’m happy to do that. That’s something my supervisor does. ’cause then the photos are up on iNaturalist at least as well.

Alan: Yeah, fine. 

Thomas: One part of my PhD is I’m looking at kind of knowledge of and species discovery in Australian plants. And particularly with citizen science and how we can improve our knowledge, both taxonomically, spatially, temporally.

And my first chapter is looking at plants that have no photos online. And across Australia there’s 3,715 plants that have no photographs online, and there’s 10 in this area. So I’m hoping to photograph some of those if I can. 

Alan: If we know what they’re, that’d be great. Yeah. 

Thomas: So have a list that I can show you guys later. There’s a grevillia, a jacksonia, a couple of things like that. 

Allie Narrating: So you’ve just heard an example of what I like to call the treasure hunting mindset of these citizen scientists as they’re out there in the desert. There’s often very specific things they’re looking for and it’s what keeps it exciting, finding those rare or endangered things. Maybe being the first person to photograph that plant or the first one to find it in that area, and you’re gonna hear that over and over again in these episodes. 

Alan: Getting out there, it’ll evolve. The first one is gonna be cumbersome. The next one will be easier. The next stop will be easier. And the last stop, well, we’ll be there for lunch. So as I say, it’s not that far. Just as we get out here, just a few hundred meters up, it gets really rough, and you need a high clearance. 

DD participant: Which way are we heading?

Alan: Just out out there. There’s a track turn right past that tin toilet and just keep going around. We all head off. No particular order.

Allie Narrating: Soon we were on the road and driving out as soon as all the cars stopped, everyone piled out and people were instantly on the ground crouched over tiny plants, putting bits of bright fluro, tape on things which would flutter in the wind so that the person with the plant press and the sheets to record the data, could one by one follow all these bits of brightly colored tape. As Alan had expected, quite often people would wander further and further away because it’s all just so interesting. 

To me at a glance, if I was just traveling and jumped out of the car to have a look at that particular spot without the intention of looking at plants this intently, I would just glance at a few plants wander over the hill, have a look around and go, yep, back in the car. Keep going. But when you’ve got people who are literally down on their knees or on their bellies, taking photos of these tiny plants and exclaiming over things, calling out to each other, it quickly became very interesting and you would just hear people spouting all these botanical names. There was always several conversations going on at once and multiple plants being identified in the same moment. It’s all in Latin. I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, but I loved it. I loved every moment of it.

Maree: Oh, yeah. That looks a bit like, um, Cephalipterum drummondii.

DD participant: Has it got a common name or a species name 

Thomas: Possibly thinking Olearia eremaea? That’s my optimistic idea.

DD participant: That’s what I want it to be.

Ruby: So color is unknown. We have no flowers. We only have fruit. Okay. 100% fruit. 

Thomas: These are obviously rubbish, Allen, but is this, is it a Chloris? 

Alan: No, it’s, um, Chloris doesn’t have the pigtail leaves. Makes it an Enneapogon, sorry, Enteropogon.

Ruby: If you look at the, these, when you look at these heads with Chloris, it’s got this really chunky, like chunky line. Whereas enter  Enteropogon. is always sort of more smooth and willowy looking. 

Thomas: Yep. 

Ruby: Basically, so if we find   Chloris , I’ll show you. It’s, it’s quite distinct, but that’s basically the florets, like  Chloris florets have a really strong end to them. Yeah. Whereas the  Enteropogon florets come to a point. 

Thomas: Is this another Eremophila? 

Maree: Yes, it’s, that is looks like, oh, that could be maculata, I think it is. ‘Tis too. 

Allie: How do you know it’s that particular one? What’s giving you that information? 

Maree: Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me (laughter) Well, for instance, see the shape of the leaves. Mm-hmm. And um, my guess would be maculata subspecies brevafolia, because that’s what’s found out here in Western Australia. The true maculata subspecies maculata is more central Eastern states. Mm. So the brevafolia form is… 

Allie: and does that one little flower give you a clue as well, or? 

Maree: Not really? It’s more the leaves, the rounded leaves. Yep. Because some maculata leaves can be, you know, that big long,

Allie: yeah, right.

Maree: Thomas has just found an Eremophila immaculata subspecies brevafolia here. 

DD participant: That is brevis isn’ it?

Allie: Botany jokes 

DD participant: Not a very good one either, really. 

Allie Narrating: I dunno if you caught that botany joke, which is classic Desert Discovery kind of joke. Maria just reeled off this really long name and part of the name was brevifolia and someone said, ‘doesn’t sound very brevis’, does it as in ‘brief’. And then we all laughed because we’re all nerds.

We ended up at an amphitheater, which is what Alan was describing earlier. It’s this big semi-circular rock formation, jutting out above the mostly flat landscape.

There were caves, there was scat, which is basically just poo. So it was like, ‘oh, quick! Mark this one so that the mammals and reptiles team can come’ and then we’d see some birds and people would be like, ‘oh, what sort of bird is that?’ And try and take a photo and give that to the bird people. We had that little specimen jar for insects if we saw any.

 At a certain point, I saw a little purple flower, which I was told was a swainsona, which turns out to be related to a pea. Maree was so proud of me. I felt so good having found something that people were interested in. 

After lunch and after most of the day out and about, I took a little moment just to reflect , and describe the scene while I sat in one of the cars and had some quiet time. And I kind of intended on this trip to do a lot of audio diary keeping and just describing things as we went.

But this was one of the only times I actually did it because. I think I just got so involved in everything that I didn’t step aside and do little audio diaries for future reference, but on this first day with the botany team I did do a little moment, so here’s that:

Allie: I am sitting in the car in the heat of the day. It’s about probably about 2:00 PM and everyone else is still out there. It’s really hot. It’s really hot, and I’m just gonna have a little bit of shady time at least the breeze is cool, which is really nice. We’ve landed at a place that is called the amphitheater, and it’s got these amazing white cliffs of gypsum and it becomes very powdery very quickly. So there’s lots of really soft the white cliffs and all the red as well. All the red all around, and the botany team are amazing. They’re so great. There’s so much excitement for every new plant, and they all come in and they’re all taking photos and picking it apart and identifying different parts of the plant.

And it’s amazing to watch a bunch of nerds all nerd out together over plants it’s a nice feeling of comradery and shared enthusiasm and there’s always a few wanderers who are wandering off and discovering the next thing to call everyone over to come and have a look at. And yeah, we’ve been here, a couple of hours I’d say we had lunch here and this morning we had a couple of hours just halfway down the road on a flat and we saw all sorts of things including camel prints, kangaroo prints, cat and hopping mouse prints right next to each other. So who knows what that story is.

Yeah, I think everyone’s starting to slow down it’s very hot and they’ve been out there for a long time. 

Allie Narrating: We all headed back to camp at the end of the day, feeling very satisfied that we’d covered some ground on our first day and we’d begun to actually see what was out there.

The next day I was out with a totally different team. And the day after that I was out with a different team again.

But I did come back to Alan later on in the trip, and I spent another day with Botany, and then I sat down with him and asked him how he got involved with Desert Discovery and how he became the team leader.

Alan: I’m a retiree from the agricultural department. Being on Desert Discovery is a nice way of meeting a lot of nice people with similar interests, even though very diverse backgrounds and we’re all out here enjoying a wilderness and enjoying a common love for plants and flowers.

My wife, she has a background in plants and we’ve both been in Australian native plant societies since ’74, so for a long time. And we often go looking through the scrub, looking through different areas, coming across to WA, looking at the wildflowers, et cetera. So we have a background in plants.

Wendy has done more with native orchids and got more involved with that in the last 15 years. We moved to Horsham in 1979 and we’d already been members of the Australian Plant Society and so we had been going to meetings there since ’79 and we’ve met Graham and Maree and the Boshans who are also DD members.

And so 34 years of interactions with plant trips and plants and who’s growing what. We had a big sandhill property with lots of native plants, most of which came from Western Australia, but also desert plants. And so we’ve been growing things. We had our own glass house, you know, propagating everything.

So our background’s been in, in native plants, and Maree invited us to attend the 2014 Desert Discovery trip. And so to invite us along to be part of desert Discovery Botany team was, reasonably logical for her. That was all pretty exciting. I meant that as a driver for my wife, who was the botanist.

And I got invited by Maree and the rest of the botany team, and I noticed that they were not collecting any grass samples. They were collecting the flowers and the shrubs, but not the grasses. And I asked why. Apparently the previous expedition they had collected grass but collected it incorrectly. So just by getting leaves and some branches were not very good herbarium specimens, and so they all got trashed. And I explained well, you needed to have a root and a whole stem with some flowers that would then allow the botanist to identify them. And even though they were too big, you can fold the stems into a Z or a W, whatever it takes to make it fit the size of a standard newsprint.

‘Oh, well,’ said Maree, ‘if you know what you’re doing, you start collecting the grasses’. And so I did. And we ended up with quite a number. It got to the stage where I would call over, ‘come over here, there’s another plant’, and the response would be. ‘Not another grass if you found it.’ We ended up with over 20 species and they were all good quality and they all were all collected and and incorporated into the plant list, which was good.

So I thought if I’m going to come back and do this again, perhaps I should learn what they were and not try and identify them in the field. And so I started collecting some to identify myself. And I thought if I’m collecting, I might as well keep them in my own herbarium. And so I thought I would collect all the grasses I could possibly get.

In doing that, I found through Oz Grass, an online program which lists all the grasses in Australia, which is very, very extensive. And there are about 1400 species of grass in Australia. And of those, I think I’ll collect about a thousand. A lot of them are hard to find. Only recorded in 1930s, 1940s, they have only been found 20 K northeast of Bollier and yeah, may never, never been seen again.

So. Then the species, subspecies varieties, varieties of varieties. So I’m not gonna get all of that. If I can get a specimen of all the species, that’ll be fine. In the seven years since 2015 when I started, I have 590 odd species and yeah, there’s still more to go, which is good. They need more DDS and I need more timing.

I’ll probably come back over to WA straight after the cyclone season and get all of the triodias that are here.

Allie Narrating: So again, Alan has described perfectly, in a nutshell, the treasure hunting attitude that is seen so often in the Desert Discovery participants and their various very specialized enthusiasms.

 In this case, it’s him trying to collect over a thousand species of grasses across Australia. That’s his personal project. He’s not collecting spoons from the towns he goes to, or stamps. His hobby is collecting grasses.

And Desert Discovery is the perfect playground for people who have these personal goals of finding particular plants or, like we heard from Thomas earlier in the episode, photographing and being the first to document a certain type of thing. Desert Discovery is this, holiday camp for people who do this anyway in their spare time.

Allie: When did Maree start edging you into the leadership role? 

Alan: The first trip, obviously at Jakarli was new to us and we are learning the ropes. We actually found having a tent and not a camper we were on, on the rear end of the track of the group and we could stop, jump out and check out the grasses, jump back in and catch up to the group and they wouldn’t know we’d stopped and that was all fine. However, the second trip in. It was a long traveling trip. We didn’t have a a base and so we were driving up through that. Towards the end of that trip, Maree offered ‘Alan get out the front and, and have a go at the front today. You drive in front today.’ Oh, that is stressful.

That now you’ve gotta look and see where the plants are. And now you’ve gotta look to see where the right stops are. And I learned what a bush pea. ‘We gotta find a bush pea.’ And I thought, what, what the heck’s this bush pea. ‘Uh, that’s for the ladies’. 

Allie: Where there’s enough shrubbery for women to be discreet in their ablutions. 

Alan: Exactly. Very politely put. 

Yeah. So that was all fun. I look for ‘bush pee’, look for shade for, for lunch. Look for a sheltered spot for camp. Uh, that’s a bit, bit stressful. Anyway, that was the first day. Sure. Hand that back to to Maree. And then at the end of that trip she said, ‘oh, I’ve gotta retire.

I’d like you to become the botany team leader.’ Oh, good on you. So then for Kiwirrkurra, I had to make the decisions and I, and she was supportive of course. And so I’ve been there for the last two trips. Let that one in this one. There you go. Now I need to find somebody else to adopt.

Allie Narrating: I asked him what sort of preparation he has to do before a Desert Discovery project like this one at Yeo Lake. 

Alan: Before we start i’ve been looking at the rainfall figures for a couple of months and comparing it with previous years, which were dry as well. And then three years ago they had their last good rain, so I thought this is gonna be really tough, and I only bought enough field books to handle about 200 collections.

And I had no expectations that I didn’t know what was in the area. Although I’ve seen a plant list of 70 off species that have been collected here, and there’s a lot of gaps. A big lot of gaps. There are very few grasses, for example, which I looked at specifically,

And so I had no real expectations. And so what we’ve been finding, even though some of them are quite small, they’re all growing from the last rain must have been a rain that wasn’t recorded in Laverton. And uh, there’s been some puddles with little plants flowering quite suitable for herbarium specimens that be identified them even though they’re not fully advanced to their potential growth size.

We’ve reached so far 170 individual species, and potentially tomorrow another a dozen or 20, we might nearly get 200, which is terrific. Much more than I expected to find. The species that meant most to me this trip, not because of its rarity, but because I’ve been looking for native boxthorn in Victoria for quite a while and trying to find some, and finally got some seed from Ned’s Corner.

But Sue came in a couple of days ago and asked, ‘what is this?’ And, ‘oh, native boxthorn. My gosh, here it is over here and there’s lots of it.’ So we collected that and that was nice. Had a good discussion. It’s quite prickly, but a lot, lot different to the African boxthorn. And lo and behold, about 50 meters from there, we found another native boxthorn that has had very round leaves, globular leaves, very like string of beads.

Really unusual form, but it’s the same plant, whether it’s the same species, maybe it’s a new species or just a variety. Then a couple of days later, we found another one that is still a box thorn still a Lycium, but it’s intermediate. It’s not the longer fleshy leaves and it’s not the round globular leaves.

They’re intermediate and so, oh, maybe it’s just a very variable species. 

Allie: So how do you then follow that up? Do you get DNA tests done of these plants or something? How do you know? 

Alan: Well, well, I’m not gonna know, but we did sample the three. And so they go to the herbarium and then they’ll make a decision, oh, we’ve seen it before or not seen it before.

They’ll then follow that up if it’s, if it is so different and the potentially new species or varieties, they may do the DNA. It’s certainly out of our sphere. All the material we collect goes to the herbarium and they make the decisions on the quality for entering into the herbarium or discarding and making a decision whether they name or not, name it. If needed, they will follow that up.

Allie: Does Desert Discovery get a little report from them about the things that you’ve submitted? 

Alan: We submit all the material in plant presses, but they won’t open the plant presses until we provide an Excel spreadsheet with all of the data in the format that they require to enter their database. The process will be that the botanist will open up the sample and will read through the field book sheet that accompanies it and find where it is, what plant associations, what soils, and then from that determine the species.

So if we’ve sent it to them all electronically, they’ll then open up the plant presses and, uh, we’ll get our results back. 

Allie: So that’s a bit of homework for you when you get back. 

Alan: That’s me transferring all of the paper notes into an Excel format and then reformatting that into the format that they require for their databases.

Allie Narrating:

So as you can hear, it’s no small job to lead a team on Desert Discovery. There’s an integrity of data collection that they’ve gradually over time been building up their skills and repertoire of how to do this so that the data they collect is the most useful it can be for its ultimate destination, which for the Botany Team is the herbarium.

That took many years and in the next episode, we’re going to explore a bit more about Desert Discoveries History as a group. And also we are gonna look at what this thing is that everyone keeps talking about, which is citizen science; what that means, how it fits into the world of science. And I think you can already start to see the sort of people that enthusiastically take part in citizen science.

Theme music and outro 

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Links and notes about the show are on the episode page on the saltgrass website, saltgrasspodcast.com. Don’t forget to get your Saltgrass ethical t-shirts, tracksuit pants, and hoodies, and there is a new range created specifically for this season with lots of designs based around the animals and plants that were found out on this Desert Discovery trip.

There’s a link for the merch front and center on the Saltgrass website. Again, that. saltgrasspodcast.com or go to the merch page on the website and see the full range of Saltgrass gear. For those of you listening on the radio, please note that you can listen to all episodes of Saltgrass on your preferred podcasting app or at saltgrasspodcast.com.

You can follow us on the socials and you can subscribe to our email list to get reminders and updates about the show. The music this season is from a song called Great Divide by the Split Peas.

(Singing) 

This program was made possible support from MainFM and the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Find out more at cbf.org au. 

My name is Allie Hanly. Thanks for listening.