Maturango Museum Elaine Wiley–
Nina House will speak at the 2023 Maturango Museum Wildflower Exhibit. She will present her study area on Saturday, April 1, 2023, at 3 pm at the Maturango Museum.
The title of her presentation is “A Vascular Flora of the Manter and Salmon Creek Watersheds in the Southern Sierra Nevada, Tulare County, CA.” Her study area encompassed a 51 square mile section of the Kern Plateau, including 25 square miles of the Domeland Wilderness area. Conducting a systematic floristic inventory of this under-documented region provided an opportunity to record rare plant locations, new county records, species at the edge of their range, and disjunct plant populations.
Documenting this diversity is vital, as land use and climate change have several ongoing impacts. Cattle grazing, off-highway vehicular use, logging, severe drought, and an altered fire regime were all documented during the study.
These disturbances will have lasting impacts on the flora. Throughout the project, Nina completed 24 field trips, totaling 90 field days, and collected 1,412 herbarium specimen records.
House received her Biology B.S. degree in 2017 before working toward her Master’s in Botany from Claremont Graduate University. She is a Museum Scientist at the UC and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California Berkeley. She works on coordinating the Jepson workshop program and revising the Jepson eFlora.
