Collecting watergrass seed: field submissions needed

The UCCE Rice Team is conducting a field survey to collect watergrass samples over the next few weeks. The samples will be grown out in the greenhouse to help us start figuring out the identification and phenotypic characteristics (how to distinguish one from another) for the watergrass species found in California rice fields. The hope is that this will give us data for developing chemical and non-chemical management plans for watergrass, similar to what we have been working on with weedy rice over the past few years.

The project was funded by the California Rice Research Board, and is led by Whitney Brim-DeForest (UCCE Sutter-Yuba) and Marie Jasieniuk (UC Davis).

Figure 1. Watergrass panicles, from left to right: late watergrass, barnyardgrass, early watergrass. (Photo credit: Luis Espino, UCANR)

We are reaching out to ask for locations of rice fields from growers and PCA's, so our team can go out and collect seed. We are looking for all types of watergrass: "mimic", early watergrass, late watergrass, barnyardgrass (Figure 1), and the new species that we started seeing a couple of years ago (Figure 2). We hope to start collecting in the next week or two, through the end of September.

For more information, and if you are interested in having us come out and sample your field(s), please contact Whitney Brim-DeForest (wbrimdeforest@ucanr.edu), or call 530-822-7515.

Figure 2. New (unknown) species of watergrass. (Photo credit: Whitney Brim-DeForest, UCANR)