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Plant Communities, Ethnoecology and Flora of the INL

The following text is from an Environmental Science and Research Foundation publication:

The INL lies in the rainshadow of mountain ranges immediately to the west. Mean annual precipitation is about 22 cm, and the scarcity of water coupled with cold winters and hot, dry summers places severe constraints on plant growth. Nevertheless, the INL proper is home to some 400 species of vascular plants. Compared with areas that have a long history of livestock grazing, the INL supports a rich diversity of native forbs. Eighty-five percent of the species are natives, and three-fourths of those are forbs.  

The natural vegetation of the INL typically consists of an overstory of shrubs and an understory of grasses and forbs. Big sagebrush is by far the most common shrub, but 43 other species of shrubs have been recorded on the INL and the adjacent Big Southern Butte. Perennial grasses are the most abundant understory plants in shrub-dominated communities and are the dominant plants in grassland communities where shrubs are scarce.   

Prior to irrigation development in adjacent valleys, the area now within the INL boundaries was the final destination of three important perennial streams, the Big Lost River, the Little Lost River, and Birch Creek. These streams emptied into playas and sinks on the floor of the 90 square kilometer area occupied during the Pleistocene by Lake Terreton. Although difficult to imagine given the current flows in the Big Lost River, landform remnants of a Pleistocene flood through Box Canyon on the INL's west side implicate that flood as the third most powerful known. 

Humans arrived on the eastern Snake River Plain about 11,000 years ago. Over 850 archaeological sites at the INL indicated a slow but steady increase in the use of the area over that period. The eastern Snake River Plain's original inhabitants likely were ancestors of the Plateau or Plains cultures who migrated to the north or northeast during the Altithermal, a period of gradual warming and drying during the early to mid Holocene. It is quite certain that from the earliest stages of human occupation on the Snake River Plain, people here were hunters of large game. Lithic tools from the earliest strata of cultural deposition include large spear points that are often associated with the bones of now extinct mammoth, caribou, bison, and horse. The ancestors of the present-day Shoshone and Bannock migrated north from the Great Basin proper as conditions became cooler and wetter some 4,500 years B.P. Archaeological sites in the region document continuity of the Shoshonean culture from 4,000 years until historic times. These native peoples primarily were hunters of large game, so the major role of plants was to furnish habitat and food for the animals that attracted the hunters to the area. Direct use of plants by the aboriginal inhabitants is only infrequently indicated by the archaeological record, but artifacts found at one INL cave suggest a variety of uses including foods, fiber, and fuel.  

The fur trade, the Oregon Trail (including Goodale's Cutoff which crossed the southwest corner of what is now the INL), and the establishment of Fort Hall all impacted the natural ecosystems and aboriginal culture of the eastern Snake River Plain in the early to mid 1800's. Bison were still numerous in the area in 1834, but numbers declined rapidly thereafter. The late 1800's witnessed severe overgrazing by domestic cattle and sheep throughout the Intermountain West, but the extent to which native plant communities on the area now occupied by the INL were impacted is unknown. Remnants of trails and wagon roads that were used, at least in part, for cattle and sheep drives indicate that the area was grazed, but it may have been used primarily as winter range. Federal legislation around the turn of the century resulted in the construction of hundreds of kilometers of canals in an effort to "reclaim" the desert, but most of these were abandoned because they wouldn't carry water. During World War II, the U.S. Navy used several hundred square kilometers of the present INL as gunnery and bombing ranges. In 1949, those ranges were coupled with a large parcel of land withdrawn from the public domain to form the National Reactor Testing Station. In 1974, the name was changed to the INEL (now the INL), and in recognition of its importance as a field laboratory for ecological research, the INL was designated as a National Environmental Research Park in 1975. It is an important reservoir of the biodiversity of sagebrush steppe ecosystems.