Please join us on October 7 to kick-off the 2021 – 2022 speaker series with our very own President Melissa Mooney!

Instead of the usual post-summer member slideshow, Melissa will be taking us on an exciting tour of the upper-elevation Great Basin sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata subsp. vaseyana) and grassland habitats from 30 mountain ranges across the state of Nevada.

You might not know it, but Melissa received her Master’s from the University of Nevada at Reno studying this subspecies of sagebrush and the other grass and herbaceous species associated with it. With the generous help of a U.S. Forest Service Fellowship, she and her two assistants spent two summers travelling the state sampling vegetation in several different mountain ranges. Braving heat, cold, wind and rain, several flat tires, and numerous “stuck in the mud” scenarios, they sampled 140 sites. The resulting data formed the basis of Melissa’s classification of sagebrush – grassland vegetation. 

Melissa will take us through a short history of botanical collecting in the Great Basin, and share some of her experiences and recently-scanned photographs of mountain ranges, and mountain plants, including a few rare ones.

Tune in to find out what the Black Rock desert, the Ruby Mountains, and the Snake Range (including the now-designated Great Basin National Park) have in common!