Paintbrush Ponderings
Alan Nelson’s key to Oklahoma Castilleja from Keys and Descriptions For The Vascular Flora of Oklahoma.
What started out as a quick photo for a simple post turned into an afternoon of studying multiple taxonomic keys, distribution maps and pollination ecology.
Since I work in the border counties along the Red River in Oklahoma, my primary reference for plant identification is the Flora of North Central Texas (FNCT).
Landscape Linguistics II
Oak savanna with encroaching brush
A previous post provides some context to the following discussion but isn’t required.
Landscapes provide lots of information regarding their current and historical status. We just have to learn to listen - or see.
A large Post Oak surrounded by much smaller Shumard oaks, cedars and ashes.
The big oak on the right of the above image has no lower limbs, nor does it have recent burn scars.
Landscape Linguistics I
Eastern Redcedar seedling in understory
The Language of the Land
The quality of the story depends on the skill of the listener.
Rumor has it that the Inuit have a hundred or so words in their language for “snow”. I’m sure that most of those would be lost on me because I simply don’t have the sophistication to distinguish them. Having grown up in Southern Oklahoma where there’s no guarantee we’ll even see snow from one year to next - I never developed that much of an appreciation for it outside of the fact that sometimes it makes better snowballs(and hurts worse when you get hit).
Range Ecology Network
Looking at Range Ecology as a Network
The following is a convoluted attempt to capture and visualize many of the relationships involved in rangelands. While certainly not exhaustive, the objective was to at least demonstrate representative relationships taking place on the landscape.
Relationships are depicted by a combination of “nodes” , which are any factors capable of influencing any other factor, and “edges” (the lines between nodes) which indicate the direction(s) of that relationship.
Disturbingly Undisturbed
Too much of the same is rarely a good thing.
For the most part we have a very narrow concept of what native rangeland vegetation should look like. That view tends to be very static. We don’t realize that what we see on a single visit is not necessarily what it will look like on the next visit. What we lack awareness of is how the plant communities vary over time depending on what is taking place on the landscape.