Wetland ecologists are awesome
This World Wetlands Day I want to shout to the wetland ecologists out there. You. Are. Amazing. Thank you.
Dylan and Rob, Wetland Ecologists doing their thing
This is what it looks like when the plant list for your property EXPLODES. How impressive is a list of 177 species recorded in one day spent in the "heavy clay soil" part of Raakajlim! And ... drum roll please ... here all along was a nationally endangered plant I've been searching for forever!
The nationally endangered Winged Peppercress (Lepidium monoplocoides)!!!
One-third of our conservation property in the northern Mallee is subject to occasional inundation after high rainfall events. After two years of wetland-inducing rain it was a confusing mass of green, so we were grateful to have some help from the professionals.
I was pretty excited when Dylan Osler from Ecological Perspective and his mate Rob asked if they could spend a weekend "nerding out on wetland plants" at Raakajlim. And I was not wrong. It was absolutely mental overload walking with these guys. Every step of the way was "Oh, look! A such and such. Interesting!" Rob and Dylan were up at the crack of dawn to survey plants in four 10m x 10m quadrats. It was slow-going, mostly on hands and knees, searching for the easily overlooked.
Along with the Winged Peppercess (which I confidently told them "No, we just have the weedy Alyssum on our place"), Rob and Dylan recorded another 17 threatened species like the endangered Mallee Cucumber, Prickly Bottlebrush, Compact Sneezeweed, Woolly Scurf-pea, Purple Love-grass, and Twiggy Sida. But my favorite was the endangered Mallee Annual Blue-bell (Wahlenbergia tumidifructa). This is surely the tiniest of all Bluebells! Deepest thanks to two extraordinary botanists. You're welcome back any day!
And I hope that day might be soon. In December 2022 the area where the quadrat surveys were completed was completely inundated with flood water from the Murray River. It’s a lot deeper and is hanging round a lot longer than any rainfall event. I’m nervously waiting to see if the Winged Peppercress and other plants will emerge from the mud!