Dear Interested Land Managers,

We want to report on our study site in Kern County, formerly an
agricultural field. As of October 1, 2002, after one year, it has 90%
native plant cover on 300 acres, with only a total of 3.5"
precipitation.

The native cover on the 300 acres started from zero a year ago, and
after the last winter's meager and droughty rainfall, native plant cover
has proceeded at the average rate of about 8% per month. The remarkable
part of this story, is that no irrigation was used on the site.

We license our ecological restoration technologies to quickly restore
local native ecosystem function for large-scale projects. You can read
more at http://www.ecoseeds.com/standards.html

The first measurable rainfall for the season this month occurred on Nov.
6 and 8 in Kern Co., producing an accumulated 1.3" which has started the
germination of the native seeds. The native plant seedlings are emerging
en-masse, and are about 1/2" in diameter as of this week.

An experiment to discover what plant seeds are cached by Kern Co.
granivores was conducted using 12 different local native species. Within
48 hours (2 nights), 11 out of the 12 species tested completely
disappeared from the measured amounts of seeds set out. This rapid
caching of native seeds will have a big impact on future revegetation
projects in at least two ways:

1.) K-rat habitat enhancement projects need to include local native
plants in the habitat actually eaten by the k-rats, other than the
exotic wild oats and weedy filaree. What are those native plants?

2.) If certain native seeds are so desirable to the k-rats that they
are like "granivore icecream", this caching activity could interfere
with the successes of future large-scale seeding projects.