Conglomerate Mesa Botany Talk with Maria Jesus

Tuesday, June 23rd at 12pm

Join me on a virtual tour through space and time to learn about the remarkable plant diversity of Conglomerate Mesa. Here, in the arid rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, a wide variety of plants survive and thrive despite some very tough growing conditions. I’ll introduce you to narrow endemics like the Inyo rockdaisy (Perityle inyoensis) and Jaeger’s hesperidanthus (Hesperidanthus jaegeri) that make their home in calcareous rock outcrops. We will also visit unusual wildflowers, like the tiny Inyo threadplant (Nemacladus inyoensis) whose flowers are barely visible to the naked eye. Of course, a visit to the desert would not be complete without appearances from cacti like the lovely Mojave fishhook cactus (Sclerocactus polyancistrus).

Click here to register for this virtual event.

About Maria: Maria Jesus is a graduate student at California Botanic Garden/Claremont Graduate University where she is completing a catalogue of flora of the southern Inyo Mountains. Thanks to a chance encounter with a plant identification course during her undergraduate English studies, Maria abandoned plans to become a librarian and found her way to field botany. She has since completed several field seasons monitoring plants in the Chihuahuan Desert, Sonoran Desert, Southern Plains, Southern Cascades, and the Great Basin. Most recently, she managed a multi-agency vegetation monitoring program aimed at informing adaptive management of public lands. Maria is a Switzer Fellow (2019) and is passionate about advancing native plant conservation.