Meeting

Speaker Bio: Michelle Cloud-Hughes is an independent botanist and restoration ecologist specializing in the deserts of southwestern U.S. Her first career was with the Soil Ecology and Restoration Group at San Diego State University, where she was first a greenhouse, lab, and fieldworker and then the project manager for restoration projects at National Training Center Fort Irwin and other California desert military bases. Since 2010, she has been working independently as Desert Solitaire Botany and Ecological Restoration, doing rare plant surveys, vegetation mapping, and other botanical work throughout the southwestern U.S.

In 2011, Michelle was present at the discovery of Cylindropuntia chuckwallensis (the chucky cholla) and became immediately attached to the chollas and their tribe. By the time the chucky cholla was published in 2014, she’d become a somewhat inadvertent expert in this often despised but extremely important and fascinating group of cacti. In the ten years since chucky’s publication, she’s been fortunate enough to participate in numerous research projects and publications examining the evolutionary relationships within the cholla tribe, with occasional research detours into other cactus genera including Pediocactus and Echinocereus.