AZ and NM vegetation pictures needed.

Non-meme Sunday: If you live in the southwestern USA, my research team needs your help!

(tldr; send me pictures of plants in Arizona and New Mexico, esp. from 1990–2005)

Hi! My name is Caroline, and I’m a 4th year PhD student in the Ecology and Evolution program at the University of Montana. I study zoonotic disease, or diseases transmitted from animals to people, specializing on hantavirus and deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus).

Long story short, there’s something strange in my data. Annual forbs and grasses are important to deer mouse survival, but the patterns across study sites aren’t consistent, even though those sites are ecologically pretty similar. I’m beginning to suspect cheatgrass expansion might be messing with my vegetation data. I’d like to see what kinds of vegetation are/were in and around my field sites, both historically, during sampling periods (1994–2006), and currently.

So, if you have pictures of vegetation from Arizona (ideally, Grand Canyon area) or New Mexico (Zuni, Navajo Reservation areas), USA, especially from 1994–2006, please consider sharing them with me. No photograph will be published or circulated, no persons identified, nothing — it’ll just be me, your fellow wild green fiend, squinting at pixelated plants, hoping to detect a relationship between vegetative cover and area.

If this sounds like citizen science you want to help with, hurray! My email is caroline.karnatz@umconnect.umt.edu or feel free to send pictures to this Facebook account/post in the comments. You have my eternal gratitude and an acknowledgement in my dissertation.

Picture of me processing a deer mouse for your viewing pleasure.