Forest-Rangeland Soil Ecology Lab: Biocrust at Hovenweep NM

A repost of Kyle Doherty's post over at the lab site...

Forest-Rangeland Soil Ecology Lab: Biocrust at Hovenweep NM: I traveled to Hovenweep National Monument today in search of cliff dwellings, but got distracted by the excellent crust communities there! ...

Biocrusts in El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico

It's that time again…photo dumps from trips taken months ago! Last Spring I joined my graduate student Jesse, and two collaborators from the National Park Service on a trip to El Malpais in New Mexico.  Jesse is working on establishing an array of monitoring plots for "unique plant communities" which are important reservoirs of biodiversity in the National Park System. 

El Malpais is a National Monument built around a series of lava flows. One cool thing about it is that the lava flows left islands of pre-existing soils. Because much of the lava is a'a, its is very difficult to traverse. The Monument resource manager, David Hayes told us there were 2 kinds of people who work at the Monument: 1. those who have hurt themselves on the lava, 2. those that will hurt themselves on the lava. This works for cows too, so the islands or "kipukas" have experienced much less disturbance historically. So in addition to selecting unique plant communities to sample, I was very intrigued to see what the biocrusts looked like in the kipukas. I had envisioned some kind of sandy soils with grasslands or woodlands. Instead, the soils were derived of older basalt, and sure enough there were plenty of biocrusts. There are a ton of places, especially in the Great Basin and Colombia Basin where basalt soils support biocrusts. But for some reason, despite much looking, I have never seen biocrusts on basalt soils on the Colorado Plateau…until El Malpais. From that moment on, I was hopelessly fascinated to see more soils. In addition to lava of different ages, there are sedimentary rocks which develop into very different soils with very different communities. Very cool place.

Maybe the coolest thing I learned was from Jesse. A Navajo story recounts the monster killing exploits of the hero twins. One of the monsters they killed was walking giant. The lava flows are the blood of walking giant. 

Appears to be a Leptogium, anyone able to ID from the picture?

Collema tenax and a Placidium species growing together as they often do.

Collema coccophorum; note the slightly reddish disks are apothecia.

A Psora species, probably globifera.

The lava flows are riddled with lava tubes. When lava is flowing the exterior may begin to harden, while the center is still liquid and able to drain out leaving tubes.

Inside a tube!

Attack of the clones!

Our Syntrichia culture collection is establishing (photo: Kyle Doherty). The older field collected Syntrichia ruralis stem is growing new green shoots, after only a couple weeks.

Nice video explaining straw checkerboard dune stabilization

If you want to see the footprint of the massive dune stabilization work associated with this railroad, go to 37°29'22.94"N 105° 1'42.60"E in Google Earth. Zoom out enough so you can see the stabilized area near the rails and the unstabilized sand. Cool isn't it?

By the way, straw checkerboards lead to biocrust growth.

Syntrichia clone library

This is the beginnings of our new culture collection of Syntrichia, established by Kyle Doherty. Eventually, we'll have roughly 50 populations each for S. ruralis and S. caninervis growing from all over the Colorado Plateau.

Behold! the Bryotron!

Its been a while since I last posted. November and early December kept me plenty busy…and that means no posts (that's why I need additional bloggers here). But anyway, was has excited me lately is our success culturing biocrust organisms, particularly mosses. I had envisioned and found some small funds to create an automated moss growing system, and put Kyle and Anita in charge of final design and implementation. They completely upgraded the design, and it has been a great success. We have 2 experiments running now for different projects, but are planning many more.

Kyle Doherty, moss farmer.

We started growing Syntrichia caninervis and Syntrichia ruralis in a growth chamber environment, but have largely abandoned these efforts and made the jump to the greenhouse late last summer.

We are Arizona's largest consumer of urine sample cups!

One experiment subjects Syntrichia ruralis sourced from different populations to different environmental conditions. The other is seeking optimal growing conditions for both Syntrichia species sourced from northern Utah.

Nostoc "volunteers" among Syntrichia shoots.

This fibrous mat in between shoots is actually a Scytonema colony.

When we inoculate with field collected material, we add several hitchhikers. Thus far, they're primarily desirable species such as N-fixing cyanobacteria, so we have no problem with this.

Kuntstformen der Natur (1904) - Ernst Haeckel

72. Muscinae (lots more here)