If you see this, quote post with flowers from your gallery. 🌱🌿 #nativeplants

Birdbill dayflower, Sacramento Mountains, southeastern New Mexico.

The first knitting project I’ve ever finished was also probably the best holiday gift I gave this year - a table runner that I sent to my aunt and uncle 😊

Happy World Soil Day!

Soil scientists, reply in the comments - what’s a course you took or a book or article you read that significantly influenced your soil science career? For me, it’s definitely the soils field course I took in undergrad, because I realized I love doing soil taxonomy!

I had the opportunity to go to North Carolina in September for the NRCS’s Basic Soil Survey training. While traversing the floodplain of an area we were practicing mapping, my team found this soil. Between the lithologic discontinuity and the gleying, none of us had ever seen anything like it. #soil

We took data both on the skid trail and the forest between the skid trails (picture of the surrounding forest below). 6/

This is what the skid trails looked like on the ground. 5/

Earlier this year, one of my colleagues was looking at various layers for the area, and noticed these very linear areas where the canopy was significantly shorter than the surrounding forests. These areas are even visible on satellite imagery on Google Maps! 2/

Two views of the same area: the Haynes Canyon Vista in the Sacramento Mountains of southeastern New Mexico. One taken during the day with White Sands visible, the other at sunset.

Got a picture of the ring of fire through eclipse glasses! Also made a pinhole projector with paper and that worked really well too

Although I’m a soil scientist, as part of my job I have to identify plants in the field. Here are a couple of interesting ones I saw a few weeks ago: pineywoods geranium (Geranium caespitosum) and rockspirea (Holodiscus dumosus).