CNDDB News Blog

Big Bear Lake is a beautiful mountain lake in Southern California and a popular year-round resort destination. What many visitors to Big Bear Lake don’t realize is that this area is home to a relict Ice Age habitat type called pebble plains; the only place in the world where this ecosystem occurs. Pebble plains are flat open areas left over from when glaciers receded in the Pleistocene age and are named for the quartzite pebbles that are pushed to the surface of the clay soil by frost heaving. Pebble plains support a unique plant community comprised of 17 protected plant taxa and 4 rare butterflies. The plants that occupy the pebble plains are sometimes referred to as “belly plants” due to their miniature stature, but once you get close to them you can see that they are just as beautiful as their larger-sized counterparts.

Pebble plains are extremely fragile and the endemic plants are very slow growing so any damage to the soil or plants can be devastating to the ecosystem. A large portion of pebble plain habitat was lost when Big Bear Lake was created in the late 1880s and early 1900s, with additional habitat lost to development around the lake in the subsequent decades. Besides development on private lands, one of the biggest threats to the remaining pebble plain habitat is high-impact recreational activities, especially off-road vehicles. Agencies and conservation organizations have made efforts to curtail off-road vehicle use through use of barriers, fencing, and signage but trespassing still occurs.

March through June are great times to visit the pebble plains, see beautiful wildflowers, and experience this unique ecosystem that only California has to offer. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Baldwin Lake Ecological Reserve has a self-guided interpretive trail and visitor center that allows hikers to experience the pebble plains. The reserve is currently closed due to COVID-19 concerns but keep an eye out for its reopening in the coming weeks.

The blank stare of foothill yellow-legged frog (Rana boylii) as it rests in a stream. What is it thinking about?

Today we celebrate members of the order Anura which is composed of frogs and toads. What’s not to love about our froggy friends? These moist goblins have large protruding eyes and a wide mouth that make them expressive, and some would describe them as “ugly cute.”

Perhaps the most remarkable life history feature of frogs and toads is their metamorphic life cycle. They start off as water dependent lifeforms, tadpoles, that have a tail for swimming and gills for breathing. The tadpoles transform into their adult form, growing lungs and limbs that enable them to survive out of the water.

Unfortunately, living a double life does not make them impervious. Amphibians are seen as “canaries in the coal mine,” indicators of environmental health. Global amphibian populations are in decline, and about one third of species are believed to be threatened. In some cases, they are even disappearing from protected areas without clear explanations. The exact cause of the decline is unknown but thought to be a combination of diverse factors that include habitat destruction, introduced species, chemical contaminants, disease, and climate change.

California is home to a number of frog species, so keep an eye out for our froggy friends next time you find yourself at a pond or stream. The CNDDB tracks 16 species of frogs or toads. Help us keep track of them by submitting your observations to us!

A frog fan explores a pond.

Today is Taxonomist Appreciation Day, an unofficial holiday which draws awareness to the incredibly important but often overlooked field of taxonomy. Taxonomists work to name, classify, and describe species, sorting organisms into groups based on shared traits and evolutionary history. Here at the CNDDB, we couldn’t do the work we do without taxonomists researching animal and plant families, writing descriptions of newly-discovered species, and reevaluating the work of past taxonomists to incorporate new data and methods. These behind-the-scenes efforts build a strong foundation for all species-based biodiversity conservation.

Many taxonomists over the past 150 years have had their hand in cataloguing and defining the species that make up California’s diverse flora and fauna. Today we’d like to highlight one taxonomist in particular: Alice Eastwood.

California Academy of Sciences, via Online Archive of California

Alice Eastwood (1859-1953) was a self-taught botanist who worked her way up to becoming the herbarium curator for the California Academy of Sciences from 1894-1949. When the 1906 earthquake hit San Francisco, she risked her life to rescue the academy’s botanical type specimens, protecting them from earthquake damage and the subsequent fires ravaging the city, even as she lost her home and personal possessions. After the earthquake, she worked to rebuild the herbarium’s collections, going out on numerous collecting trips throughout the Western US and trading duplicate specimens with other herbaria until the herbarium’s collections were three times as large as they had been before.

Without Alice Eastwood’s tireless work, much of our knowledge of California’s flora would have been lost forever. She published over 300 scientific articles, described 395 plant species, and founded the journal Leaflets of Western Botany with her friend and successor John Thomas Howell. She was especially interested in studying the Arctostaphylos, Castilleja, and Lupinus genera, all of which are well-represented in the California flora.

Alice Eastwood’s contributions to California botany are all over the place if you know where to look, and she is immortalized by the many taxa bearing her name. Two plant genera are named after her—Aliciella and Eastwoodia—as well as 17 species. Seven of these are CNPS-listed rare plants tracked by the CNDDB: Aliciella ripleyi (Ripley’s aliciella), Aliciella trilodon (Coyote gilia), Arctostaphylos crustacea ssp. eastwoodiana (Eastwood’s brittle-leaf manzanita), Delphinium parryi ssp. eastwoodiae (Eastwood’s larkspur), Eriogonum eastwoodianum (Eastwood’s buckwheat), Fritillaria eastwoodiae (Butte County fritillary), and Sedum laxum ssp. eastwoodiae (Red Mountain stonecrop). If you come across one of these special plants honored to bear her name, take a moment to remember Alice Eastwood, and then fill out an Online Field Survey Form to tell us about your discovery. It’s what she would have done.