“Wait, how many branches was that?” — Community monitoring of Joshua trees launches with leadership training

The volunteer leaders — from the California Native Plants Society, the Mohave Desert Land Trust, and the Transitions Habitat Conservancy — spent the Veteran’s Day weekend at Puma Canyon to learn a protocol for demographic surveys of Joshua tree populations, guided by Willamette University Associate Professor of Biology Chris Smith and his collaborators on the Joshua Tree Genome Project, US Geological Survey ecologist Todd Esque and CSU Northridge Assistant Professor of Biology Jeremy Yoder.Read the full story here