The San Joaquin Valley & Carrizo Plain National Monument are magical spots. Here are the main two things that popped for me (for research I am fortunate to be participating in) from the Natural Communities Conference hosted by the local chapter of The Wildlife Society.

Measure the seedbank and survey the grasshoppers.

No kidding. I bet these two interactors within the local plant-animal networks, evenly simply depicted herein, are pivotal indirect measures that inform network connectances and serve as key predictors for the critical animal species locally.

Here are the two interactions sets or chains I propose.

Here are the potential implications, cursorily, that relate both resource, habitat, and consumer dynamics within these desert systems.