Date: February 16, 2012, (doors open 6:45 pm, Speaker at 7:30 pm)
Speaker: Fred Roberts
Subject: Botanical Explorations At Broadwell Dry Lake, Mojave Desert
Location: Duck Club, Irvine (Directions)
Desert Solar Power is the new gold rush in California. Already, eleven projects covering nearly 60 square miles have been approved. Many more are on the way. In 2009, the Sleeping Beauty Valley, east of Barstow, California, was the location of a proposed solar power plant project that included 5,100 acres just to the west of Broadwell Dry Lake. Fred had the opportunity to join a team of 45 botanists that spread over the valley searching for rare plants and recording the floristic diversity. Circumstances were ideal with a large number of experienced experts, a spectacular landscape, and one of the places in the Mojave Desert of 2009 with adequate rainfall for a real wildflower showing. There was the unexpected benefit for the surveyors who came to truly appreciate Broadwell Valley, that the project was withdrawn over controversy involving BLM and Wildlands Conservancy, which had originally donated the land to BLM for conservation.
Join the speaker tonight as he offers a tour of the wildflowers and landscapes near Broadwell Dry Lake. Among the discoveries made, was California’s northern most population of the rare crucifixion thorn (Castella emoryii). Along the way, you will get a taste of what it is like to participate in a desert solar project survey, learn something of the industry, and the fragile desert ecosystem where this energy gold rush is taking place.
Fred Roberts, author of Vascular Plants of Orange County, California, An annotated Checklist (2008) and co-author of Bob Allen’s soon to be published Wildflowers of the Santa Ana Mountains. and adjacent regions, has been working with native plants since high school. He was the assistant curator of the Herbarium at the Museum of Systematic Biology at U.C. Irvine for nine years, worked as a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service primarily adding species to the endangered species list, and has spent the last 12 years as an independent consultant. In addition to several books, he is an artist and photographer. His specialty is oaks, lilies and their relatives, and rare plants of southern California. Thanks to the Broadwell survey experience, he has expanded his interests to the California deserts as well.
