Coyote Canyon

My friend @ezpixels led me on a tour along Coyote Canyon Trail in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve this morning. It's an area I did not visit while preparing the preserve's flora. The area had only been added to the preserve in November 2013 when the work on the flora was winding down, so did not receive the attention it deserved.

One stretch of the trail passes through a zone where groundwater is forced close to the surface by granite bedrock. There we found many riparian plants such as monkeyflower, as well as its cousin false monkeyflower, a new species for the preserve's flora. Another addition to the flora is a single specimen of bristly scaleseed.

During the course of conducting the flora, my coauthor @chelsey4 planned and executed a seed bank study. One of the unique species that turned up in the greenhouse was toad flax. Today we found a sizeable population of toad flax growing along one of the wetter areas in the canyon.

Posted on April 15, 2017 07:18 AM by stevejones