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- Written by: Karen Sullivan, Kim Riley and Terre Logsdon
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – What native wildflower can take hold on banks and prevent erosion, is fire retardant, drought tolerant, fast-growing, won’t need to be pruned, hummingbird pollinated, attracts bees, and suppresses weeds and invasive grasses, and like most plants in this genus, is deer resistant and needs no water once established?
If you guessed Sonoma Creeping Sage, you are correct!
Found predominantly in the Red Hills soils around the slopes of Mt. Konocti, salvia sonomensis, or Sonoma Creeping Safe, is in bloom April through May and is extremely drought, heat and cold tolerant, can grow on serpentine soils that we mentioned in a previous column, and will take watering in your landscaping for other plants if the soils have good drainage.
This creeping (which means it grows close to the ground thus making an excellent groundcover) Sonoma sage is an evergreen perennial found in full sun on rocky slopes to partial shade under pines.
“Many sages grow throughout California, but this one has a distinct natural range. It can be found in coastal areas from Santa Barbara to San Diego. It’s also found in the Sonoma County region,” including parts of Lake and Napa Counties, according to Epic Gardening.
The largest habitat for this plant is along the Sierra Nevada mountain range where it grows on southwest-facing slopes below 6000 feet, in foothills and slopes above the central valley region because these all share similar climates: hot arid summer days, cooler and more humid nights - just like Lake County.
With silvery grey and fragrant leaves you may wonder (because they do look similar and are a salvia as well) if the leaves of Sonoma creeping sage can be used in cooking?
Although not poisonous, creeping sage (Salvia sonomensis) does not taste at all like culinary sage (or common sage, Salvia officinalis) so it is recommended to leave it for the bees.
The flower spikes range from a soft lilac to a bicolor blue and create a gorgeous pop of color against the sage green leaves while in bloom April through May.
For more information, visit CalScape at https://calscape.org/Salvia-sonomensis-(Sonoma-Sage)?srchcr=sc5af90eb8ae5d7.
Nurseries where you can purchase seeds/starts: https://calscape.org/nurseries.php?id=3371&showmap=1.
Terre Logsdon is an environmentalist, certified master composter, and advocate for agroecology solutions to farming. An avid fan and protector of California wildflowers, plants, natural resources, and the environment, she seeks collaborative solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change. Kim Riley is retired, an avid hiker at Highland Springs, and has lived in Lake County since 1985. After 15 years of trail recovery and maintenance on the Highland Springs trails, she is now focused on native plants, including a native plant and pollinator garden on her property as well as promoting and preserving the beauty of the Highland Springs Recreation Area. Karen Sullivan has operated two nurseries to propagate and cultivate native plants and wildflowers, has lived in Kelseyville for the past 30 years, rides horses far and wide to see as many flowers as possible, and offers native plants and wildflowers for sale to the public. You can check her nursery stock here. They are collaborating on a book, Highland Springs Recreation Area: A Field Guide, which will be published in the future. In the meanwhile, please visit https://www.facebook.com/HighlandSpringsNaturalists and https://www.facebook.com/HighlandSpringsRecreationArea.
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- Written by: Robert Sanders
Notwithstanding February's cold snap in Texas and Louisiana, climate change is leading to warmer winter weather throughout the southern U.S., creating a golden opportunity for many tropical plants and animals to move north, according to a new study in the journal Global Change Biology.
Some of these species may be welcomed, such as sea turtles and the Florida manatee, which are expanding their ranges northward along the Atlantic Coast.
Others, like the invasive Burmese python — in the Florida Everglades, the largest measured 18 feet, end-to-end – maybe less so.
Equally unwelcome, and among the quickest to spread into warming areas, are the insects, including mosquitoes that carry diseases such as West Nile virus, Zika, dengue and yellow fever, and beetles that destroy native trees.
"Quite a few mosquito species are expanding northward, as well as a lot of forestry pests: bark beetles, the southern mountain pine beetle," said Caroline Williams, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the paper. "In our study, we were really focusing on that boundary in the U.S. where we get that quick tropical-temperate transition. Changes in winter conditions are one of the major, if not the major, drivers of shifting distributions."
That transition zone, northward of which freezes occur every winter, has always been a barrier to species that evolved in more stable temperatures, said Williams, who specializes in insect metabolism — in particular, how winter freezes and snow affect the survival of species.
"For the vast majority of organisms, if they freeze, they die," she said. "Cold snaps like the recent one in Texas might not happen for 30 or 50 or even 100 years, and then you see these widespread mortality events where tropical species that have been creeping northward are suddenly knocked back. But as the return times become longer and longer for these extreme cold events, it enables tropical species to get more and more of a foothold, and even maybe for populations to adapt in situ to allow them to tolerate more cold extremes in the future."
The study, conducted by a team of 16 scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, focused on the effects warming winters will have on the movement of a broad range of cold-sensitive tropical plants and animals into the Southern U.S., especially into the eight subtropical U.S. mainland states: Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Williams and Katie Marshall of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver co-wrote the section on insects for the study.
The team found that a number of tropical species, including insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, grasses, shrubs and trees, are enlarging their ranges to the north. Among them are species native to the U.S., such as mangroves, which are tropical salt-tolerant trees; and snook, a warm water coastal sport fish; and invasive species such as Burmese pythons, Cuban tree frogs, Brazilian pepper trees and buffelgrass.
“We don’t expect it to be a continuous process,” said USGS research ecologist Michael Osland, the study’s lead author. “There’s going to be northward expansion, then contraction with extreme cold events, like the one that just occurred in Texas, and then movement again. But by the end of this century, we are expecting tropicalization to occur.”
The authors document several decades’ worth of changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme cold snaps in San Francisco, Tucson, New Orleans and Tampa – all cities with temperature records stretching back to at least 1948. In each city, they found, mean winter temperatures have risen over time, winter’s coldest temperatures have gotten warmer, and there are fewer days each winter when the mercury falls below freezing.
Temperature records from San Francisco International Airport, for example, show that before 1980, each winter would typically see several sub-freezing days. For the past 20 years, there has been only one day with sub-freezing temperatures.
Changes already underway or anticipated in the home ranges of 22 plant and animal species from California to Florida include:
– Continuing displacement of temperate salt marsh plants by cold-sensitive mangrove forests along the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts. While this encroachment has been happening over the last 30 years, with sea-level rise, mangroves may also move inland, displacing temperate and freshwater forests.
– Buffelgrass and other annual grasses moving into Southwestern deserts, fueling wildfire in native plant communities that have not evolved in conjunction with frequent fire.
– The likelihood that tropical mosquitos that can transmit encephalitis, West Nile virus and other diseases will further expand their ranges, putting millions of people and wildlife species at risk of these diseases.
– Probable northward movement, with warming winters, of the southern pine beetle, a pest that can damage commercially valuable pine forests in the Southeast.
– Recreational and commercial fisheries’ disruption by changing migration patterns and the northward movement of coastal fishes.
The changes are expected to result in some temperate zone plant and animal communities found today across the southern U.S. being replaced by tropical communities.
"Unfortunately, the general story is that the species that are going to do really well are the more generalist species — their host plants or food sources are quite varied or widely distributed, and they have relatively wide thermal tolerance, so they can tolerate a wide range of conditions," Williams said. "And, by definition, these tend to be the pest species — that is why they are pests: They are adaptable, widespread and relatively unbothered by changes in conditions, whereas, the more specialized or boutique species are tending to decline as they get displaced from their relatively narrow niche."
She cautioned that insect populations overall are falling worldwide.
"We are seeing an alarming decrease in total numbers in natural areas, managed areas, national parks, tropical rain forests — globally," she said. " So, although we are seeing some widespread pest species increasing, the overall pattern is that insects are declining extremely rapidly."
The authors suggest in-depth laboratory studies to learn how tropical species can adapt to extreme conditions and modeling to show how lengthening intervals between cold snaps will affect plant and animal communities.
"On a hopeful note, it is not that we are heading for extinction of absolutely everything, but we need to prepare for widespread shifts in the distribution of biodiversity as climate, including winter climate, changes," Williams said. "The actions that we take over the next 20 years are going to be critical in determining our trajectory. In addition to obvious shifts, like reducing our carbon footprint, we need to protect and restore habitat for insects. Individuals can create habitat in their own backyards for insects by cultivating native plants that support pollinators and other native insects. Those are little things that people can do and that can be important in providing corridors for species to move through our very fragmented habitats."
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of boxer, hound, Maltese, terrier and pit bull.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm for information on visiting or adopting.
‘Sophie’
“Sophie” is a female boxer-pit bull mix with a short red coat.
She is in kennel No. 18, ID No. 14356.
Male terrier
This young male terrier has a coarse white coat with brown markings.
He is in kennel No. 20, ID No. 14487.
Male Maltese
This senior male Maltese has a long white coat.
He is in kennel No. 24, ID No. 14489.
‘Sanders’
“Sanders” is a young male hound mix with a short black and white coat.
He is in kennel No. 26, ID No. 14497.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Miles Hatfield
Eleven billion miles away – more than four times the distance from us to Pluto – lies the boundary of our solar system’s magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun’s magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins.
“It's really the largest boundary of its kind we can study,” said Walt Harris, space physicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
We still know little about what lies beyond this boundary. Fortunately, bits of interstellar space can come to us, passing right through this border and making their way into the solar system.
A new NASA mission will study light from interstellar particles that have drifted into our solar system to learn about the closest reaches of interstellar space.
The mission, called the Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer, or SHIELDS, will have its first opportunity to launch aboard a suborbital rocket from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on April 19, 2021.
Our entire solar system is adrift in a cluster of clouds, an area cleared by ancient supernova blasts. Astronomers call this region the Local Bubble, an oblong plot of space about 300 light-years long within the spiraling Orion arm of our Milky Way galaxy. It contains hundreds of stars, including our own Sun.
We fare this interstellar sea is our trusty vessel, the heliosphere, a much smaller (though still gigantic) magnetic bubble blown up by the Sun. As we orbit the Sun, the solar system itself, encased in the heliosphere, hurtles through the Local Bubble at about 52,000 miles per hour (23 kilometers per second). Interstellar particles pelt the nose of our heliosphere like rain against a windshield.
Our heliosphere is more like a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: Its surroundings mold its shape. It compresses at points of pressure, expands where it gives way. Exactly how and where our heliosphere’s lining deforms gives us clues about the nature of the interstellar space outside it. This boundary – and any deformities in it – are what Walt Harris, principal investigator for the SHIELDS mission, is after.
SHIELDS is a telescope that will launch aboard a sounding rocket, a small vehicle that flies to space for a few minutes of observing time before falling back to Earth. Harris’ team launched an earlier iteration of the telescope as part of the HYPE mission in 2014, and after modifying the design, they’re ready to launch again.
SHIELDS will measure light from a special population of hydrogen atoms originally from interstellar space. These atoms are neutral, with a balanced number of protons and electrons. Neutral atoms can cross magnetic field lines, so they seep through the heliopause and into our solar system nearly unfazed – but not completely.
The small effects of this boundary crossing are key to SHIELDS’s technique. Charged particles flow around the heliopause, forming a barrier. Neutral particles from interstellar space must pass through this gauntlet, which alters their paths. SHIELDS was designed to reconstruct the trajectories of the neutral particles to determine where they came from and what they saw along the way.
A few minutes after launch, SHIELDS will reach its peak altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers) from the ground, far above the absorbing effect of Earth’s atmosphere. Pointing its telescope towards the nose of the heliosphere, it will detect light from arriving hydrogen atoms. Measuring how that light’s wavelength stretches or contracts reveals the particles’ speed. All told, SHIELDS will produce a map to reconstruct the shape and varying density of matter at the heliopause.
The data, Harris hopes, will help answer tantalizing questions about what interstellar space is like.
For instance, astronomers think the Local Bubble as a whole is about 1/10th as dense as most of the rest of the galaxy’s main disk. But we don’t know the details – for instance, is matter in the Local Bubble is distributed evenly, or bunched up in dense pockets surrounded by nothingness?
“There's a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar medium – our maps are kind of crude,” Harris said. “We know the general outlines of these clouds, but we don't know what's happening inside them.”
Astronomers also don’t know much about the galaxy’s magnetic field. But it should leave a mark on our heliosphere that SHIELDS can detect, compressing the heliopause in a specific way based on its strength and orientation.
Finally, learning what our current plot of interstellar space is like could be a helpful guide for the (distant) future. Our solar system is just passing through our current patch of space. In some 50,000 years, we’ll be on our way out of the Local Bubble and on to who knows what.
“We don't really know what that other cloud is like, and we don't know what happens when you cross a boundary into that cloud,” Harris said. “There's a lot of interest in understanding what we're likely to experience as our solar system makes that transition.”
Not that our solar system hasn’t done it before. Over the last four billion years, Harris explains, Earth has passed through a variety of interstellar environments. It’s just that now we’re around, with the scientific tools to document it.
“We're just trying to understand our place in the galaxy, and where we're headed in the future,” Harris said.
Miles Hatfield works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
