WA State Parks has a 2006 dataset from a volunteer at Willapa National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) who documented all the yellow sand verbena (Abronia sp.) plants he could find on the long beach peninsula.

There has been active restoration in the NWR for 20 years and with the adjacent Leadbetter State Park efforts have been intermittent and records are scarce. The vast majority of the detections are south of these two ownerships, and likely no restoration has happened at all. It’s a checkerboard of ownerships, and the boundaries are poorly described and poorly monumented. So it’s basically nearly impossible to tell who own’s what where the Abronia grows. There are some clear places where it is State Parks ownership, but there is a lot of uncertainty in many places as well.

I think the research question would be – have occurrences of Abronia changed over the last twenty years? Have they moved? Are they more or less dense? Are there more or fewer overall? Are there patterns to changes in distribution? How would you recommend managing for Abronia to persist? How about other native plants?

Yellow sand verbena is also host for the sand verbena moth, but they’re not known to occur on the coast – just in the Straight of Juan de Fuca area.

Also pink sand verbena occurs on the Willapa NWR, is of conservation concern, and can hybridize with yellow, even though yellow is a perennial and pink is an annual. How nuts is that?!?! What are the offspring? What are the implications for restoring healthy pink sand verbena populations.

So… there’s a ton to dig into with the species, and this dataset could be a good quantitative component of a student project. The original surveyor is still in contact with the NWR as a volunteer, I’m sure he’d be interested in working with the student, too.

Contact: Nathan Johnson Nathan.Johnson@PARKS.WA.GOV