Mysteries & Magic of the Vernal Pool
4th Friday Lecture
April 23, 2010
"In any direction, my feet would brush about a hundred flowers with every step...as if I were wading in liquid gold"
~ John Muir describing the Central Valley of California in the spring of 1868
ShareThis! “Imagine a grassland so full of flowers that you can’t see green, then ask me why I like vernal pools,” challenges Dr. Bob Holland. More than just oversized puddles, vernal pools are an important part of the Californian ecology, supporting numerous rare plants and animals. Dry for part of the year, they are called vernal pools because they are often, at their peak depth in the spring ("vernal" meaning of, relating to, or occurring in the spring). At this point they are teeming with life!
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As they dry, beautiful displays of wildflowers which bloom in brilliant and dramatic circles of color follow the receding shoreline of the pools. Dr. Holland explained how vernal pools create unique environmental niches created by acidity, salinity and moisture. Inside the pools, devoid of fish, grow natal amphibian, numerous insect species and a few special crustaceans.
More than 90% of California's vernal pools have already been lost to residential development, but our region hosts one of the best of the few remaining vernal-pool habitats - which are found only in few places in the world. Dr. Holland led the audience through California's precious gems and the life behind the color.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Bob Holland has studied California plant life since arriving at UC Davis for graduate school in 1972. Early work in vernal pools expanded into the broader realm of vegetation, culminating in his 1986 “Preliminary descriptions of California natural communities”, the first bibliographically driven classification of California vegetation types. He has studied sensitive plants in every California county (except Del Norte) and has mapped more than 30,000,000 acres of vegetation. An outside-the-box thinker, he enjoys integrating seemingly disparate disciplines ranging from population genetics to plate tectonics in interpreting California plant life.
Restricted in his travel by the gas shortage of the mid-1970s, and at the urging of Professor Jack Major at U.C.
Davis, Dr. Holland shifted his focus from the island biogeography of alpine floras of the Great Basin he’d planned to work on, and for his doctoral work began to look at nearby vernal pools as islands in the grasslands.
Many thousands of vernal pools later, from then-overlooked places such as Firebaugh, Pixley, Plainsburg, Richvale, and Vina, Dr. Holland discovered a slice of the California flora and history of a natural landscape that he has been promoting ever since. Through professional writings, field trips, classes, docent training, personal contacts with students, other scientists, journalists, bureaucrats, and legislators, Dr. Holland’s infectious enthusiasm for vernal pools has focused attention and appreciation on, he was hired by the California Department of Fish and Game as community ecologist in the early 1980s.
Basing his descriptions on an earlier work by Cheatham and Haller, Dr. Holland published a definitive report in 1986 that defined and classified the many plant communities of California. Dr. Holland’s work was further expanded by Sawyer and Keeler-Wolf in the 1995 CNPS publication, A Manual of California Vegetation. With an agle eye, sense of humor, and deep understanding of the California landscape Dr. Holland has served California’s native lands well.
Return to the Archives Main Page
Or visit another lecture in this series:
| Sep. 25, 2009 - | Salmon at the Heart of Nature |
| Oct. 23, 2009 - | Journey of Discovery: California |
| Jan. 22, 2010 - | Tending the Wild: Native Americans and the Land |
| Feb. 26, 2010 - | Mysteries and Magic of the Vernal Pool |
| Mar. 26, 2010 - | Marvelous, Mysterious Mars |
| Apr. 23, 2010 - | Restoring the Mesopotamian Marshes |
Many Thanks to our 2009-2010 Sponsors
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Marion Friedman |
49er Printing |
Unity of Auburn |