I’ve had a love affair with desert and its flora since I don’t know when…perhaps the late 1990s. I started photographing desert wildflowers in earnest in 2005. I have well over 100,000 photos of plants. I spend time every day learning something about plants or animals, sometimes for hours at a time.

Many years after graduation from college, I decided to pursue botany and ecology. After many years of hard work I’m now a botanist with an environmental services company. I earned a Joshua Tree Master Naturalist certification several years ago. All wild critters are important and I continue to work hard to learn about them and their dependencies on flora.

I love studying science and don’t plan to ever stop. I am finishing classes at UC Riverside Extension’s for their Field Ecology Certificate. I’ve completed classes in Ecology, CEQA, and related topics at UC San Diego, College of the Desert, and City College of San Francisco.

I am a member of the California Native Plant Society and have participated in their workshops such as wetland/riparian plant ID, and CEQA impact assessment. I have volunteered at the Jepson Herbarium in Berkeley, and contribute observations to CalFlora and am volunteer reference photo editor on that site. I attend symposia for CNPS, Northern California Botanists Association and the California Invasive Plant Council.

In the future, I hope that we can reform our education system so that children begin to learn ecology in place of or at least alongside biology so that they understand their place in the world and the importance of thousands of species of birds, mammals, reptiles, other vertebrates, invertebrates and yes, plants…the foundation of the food chain. We have emphasized the importance of humans for too long.