Pollinating sun cup flowers for desert restoration

USGS Western Ecological Research Center scientist Lesley DeFalco pollinates sun cup flowers for the Desert Restoration Program. In the experiment pictured here, USGS scientists pollinated individual sun cup flowers using a small paintbrush to help increase seed stocks to use in experiments throughout the Mojave Desert. After pollination, the ripened seeds were collected and incorporated into an experiment to understand how plants from different populations across the desert function when moved into new environmental conditions of temperature and rainfall.