Student Spotlight: Naming Native Plants Gives Tony Villalobos His Day in the Sun

For Tony Villalobos, the best single day of work from his latest field season began with down-and-dirty plant ID, and ended with a collective cold plunge. And none of it necessarily felt like work, he said, which is one way this graduating senior from Quinney College of Natural Resources knew that he had landed in the right major.

Villalobos was working last summer with a team of U.S. Geological Survey researchers near the Canyonlands Research Center, south of Moab, Utah. The team collected data about biological soil crusts, using drones to gather information about how a shifting climate is impacting the delicate mats of lichens, mosses and fungi that stabilize Southern Utah’s sandy soils.

Villalobos spent long hours using his recently hard-earned knowledge to visually identify hundreds of native plants. He worked shoulder-to-shoulder with experts, learning the different ways drones can be used in ecological research, asking questions, gathering practical information about the landscape and observing a bevy of skilled professionals passionate about their work.

“There’s something about being outside that helps you get to know other people really fast,” he said.

At the end of the long, hot and productive day, the entire crew decided the best way to recuperate would be a quick trip to a local reservoir.

“There were like 25 people who’d been at it just as hard as I was working,” he said. “We all took a plunge into the cold water, and it felt so great. Then we were back at camp and cooking together, everyone talking, joking, dripping and really happy to be doing this kind of meaningful work. It really was a great day.”

Villalobos had explored different majors at USU, but ultimately settled in QCNR for the chance to be outside more often, doing hands-on work with plants — which he now admits is his somewhat nerdy passion.

“There is always a bit of friendly competition with plant identification when you are out in the field,” he said, “especially the grasses. They are really pretty hard to distinguish from each other. Even the apps get them wrong most of the time. It’s kind of empowering to rely on my own instincts, to be able to know more than an app does,” he said.

And of course, there was also an actual competition this year that Villalobos had the chance to attend with the Society of Range Management. Villalobos served in leadership for the club, which focuses on local restoration work. The group organized plantings, trail clean ups, and community engagement activities in and around the Cache Valley community.

The heat of competition didn’t compare to actually applying what he learned to conservation and restoration, he said — learning how to tell if a site is degraded and how to help it recover; putting all the pieces together in a management perspective.

During his time at USU Villalobos also participated in applied research at the Wuda Ogwa site, supporting restoration efforts of the Northwestern Band of Shoshone. The project is exploring ways to restore to the landscape culturally significant wildflowers such as the sego lily — testing how different conditions of the soil, rodent activity and the makeup of the plant community impact the lily’s germination, survival and establishment.

“We want to find the best ways to get sego lily back into the ecosystem,” he said. This project, along with other long-term undergraduate-led research projects on topics like herpetology, bat acoustics, and even roadkill surveys at the site, are being supported by QCNR faculty Eric LaMalfa.

Villalobos is set to graduate this semester in Conservation and Restoration Ecology, and ready to lead a vegetation crew of his own in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service in Logan Canyon.