B.S. Botany and Environmental studies, UW-Madison, 2023
Pronouns: She/her
Research Interests
I am broadly interested in plant ecology, restoration ecology, and fire ecology. I am curious about plant functional traits, especially those related to fire adaptation, and intraspecific variation.
Statement
I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and fell in love with prairies during my undergraduate years in Madison, Wisconsin! In my spare time, I like to run, bike, do ceramics, knit, and read.
Biology & Geography/GIS major, Gustavus Adolphus College ’22
Pronouns: she/her
Research Interests
My research interests include plant-insect interactions, the effects of fire on plant reproduction, flowering phenology and generally how human disturbance impacts prairie species. Currently, I am working on an experiment with Alex which investigates the effects of smoke on Echinacea flowering. I’m excited to gain more skills this summer in mentoring, data management and analysis, techniques like hand-crossing, and leading field crews!
Statement
I am from Minneapolis, MN and spent my college years in the great city of St. Peter, MN. I have been working with the Echinacea Project since last June as a research intern.
In my spare time I like to read lots of books, run long distances, play board games, embark on various crafting projects, listen to concerning amounts of Taylor Swift music, and spend as much time outside as I can.
Me posing with the skunk cabbage in McDonald Woods this spring!
This Saturday was a glorious day: Independent Bookstore Day! Every year on the last Saturday in April, the nation celebrates indie bookstores in all sorts of ways. In Chicago (and the Twin Cities and maybe other places), local bookstores participate in a passport event – visit as many bookstores as you can, get a stamp at each one, and win a prize based on how many you visit!
With 40 participating stores this year, visiting 10 would get you 10% off at all the bookstores for a year, and 15 would get you 15% off. Individual stores also often had their own special goodies for the day, including snacks, pencils, tote bags, and other exclusive (and often free!) merchandise. Alex and I were up for the challenge. In fact, we even took on a non-book related side quest, more on that later.
An approximate map of our odyssey
We started out strong with Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, where we got free totes, some books, and our passports with our first stamp. We made our way south, visiting stores both familiar and novel.
A much needed tamale stopSkunk Cabbage Books gave us a Ratibida seedling with our purchase!
Upon reaching our tenth bookstore, we were both awarded pins that will give us a 10% discount at all 40 stores for the rest of the year. We rejoiced! But at our 11th bookstore, tragedy struck. I couldn’t find my passport anywhere, and I fear it was left at our tenth stop. We mourned! The show didn’t stop though, because Alex still had her passport, we had four more bookstores to go, and one very important side quest.
Stores 12-14 were located within walking distance of each other in Wicker Park, so we visited them all in one stop and got falafel sandwiches and waffle fries to boot. With full stomaches and a clear bath forward, we took of to Goose Island, home of the holy Restaurant Depot.
Our secret mission was to locate and extract one gallon of Wright’s Smoked Hickory for Alex and Lindsey’s smoke experiment. The job was difficult; mammoth quantities of random everyday ingredients tantalized us at every turn. However, I am happy to report the mission was a complete success. We escaped with our sanity intact and only one extra item (who can say no to a big ol’ container of chocolate hazelnut wafer rolls?).
Mission success!!!!
We hit our 15th bookstore on our way back north, where Alex was celebrated as a grand winner of the day (though they had run out of 15 store pins). Victorious, we made our way back to Evanston. Until next time, bookstores!
(we also saw some lovely street art)
LoversPlaying some Rimsky-Korsakov on the world’s smallest violin
Reliable forecasts and accurate assessments of current conditions are critical for conducting prescribed burns. We are fortunate to have many weather resources. Here are the sources I use for planning and conducting prescribed burns.
Things are movin’ and groovin’ in the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden!
Now that we’ve wrapped up remnant Echinacea, it’s time to reenter common garden territory. Ah, sweet sweet common garden, where all plants exist neatly* on a grid unlike the unruly remnants.
One of the main things we’ve been tackling is cleaning the 2022 common garden heads. There are 2,116 heads to be cleaned and we’ve already cleaned 561 (or ~27%) of them! Wow, amazing progress! The only remaining and 3 additional bags from 2020. Once those are done, we’re caught up from the backlog that COVID augmented. As for other steps in the ACE process…
Volunteers and students cleaning way!
After cleaning comes rechecking, and we’ve had students working on rechecking Echinacea heads from experimental plot 1 in 2019 and 2020. Once these have been rechecked, we’ve got scan-master volunteer Marty prepare our achenes for uploading to the ACE website!
Our volunteers have also been catching us up on counting from 2017 through 2019 to get data ready for Wyatt’s masters thesis! I won’t spoil what she’s investigating, but just know it’s a burning question that I’m stoked about!
Alex and I have also been attempting to clean up the Cheerios boxes that line our lab window. These boxes contain achenes from the past 20 years and many different experiments, all at different stages of the ACE process. Volunteers have started assembling some of the achenes into x-ray sheets for the years 2017 and 2018.
We also had Priti help us inventory boxes from 2016. We took seeds out of these boxes for our seed addition experiment, but were unsure what achenes actually remained. These seeds did not germinate, so we will put them in storage. However, we have other seeds that are still viable, so we are hoping to freeze them and put them in the seed bank here at CBG!
Priti with all the boxes!
We’re hoping to keep moving forward this spring with all steps of the ACE process, and create an efficient system for taking data off the ACE counting and classifying website!
*it would be neatly if it weren’t for those meddling rogue plants!
This February, Lindsey and I attended the Chicago Wilderness prescription burn training at the Morton Arboretum. This month, we put our burn training to good use and joined Jared and the burn crew at the Chicago Botanic Garden for a woodland burn. I participated in prairie burns in Minnesota last spring, but this was my first woodland burn, so I was glad to gain more diverse fire experience.
A member of the DuPage burn crew shows off prescribed burn equipment
We burned part of McDonald woods on the east side of the garden, and we needed an east wind to keep the smoke off of Green Bay Road. The wind was ~11 mph, but we were burning down in a gully which blocked the wind, so the fire crept very slowly. Overall, the woodland burn was much slower and patchier than the past prairie burns, but that was what I expected from the woods. I also got to use a drip torch for the first time, which was very fun!
Burning along the bike pathLindsey and Alex in PPE
Happy Spring! Yesterday was the equinox, so now it’s officially in spring. It has been an unseasonably warm winter in Chicago, so it has felt like spring for several weeks here already. Lindsey and I spotted snowdrops flowering at the Morton Arboretum back on February 18. Here at the Botanic Garden, the winter aconite and crocus plants and are currently in bloom. The skunk cabbages are also looking spiffy.
February snowdropsUp-close and personal crocusCheery winter aconite
In contrast, Minnesota has experienced the eighth snowiest winter on record, and our field site was buried under >1 foot of snow all winter. The snow still hasn’t all melted, so it will be a few weeks before the spring ephemerals make an appearance. Hopefully, we’ll get to experience spring twice: once in Illinois and once in Minnesota!
Skunk cabbage!The skunk cabbage is well camouflaged
After cleaning Liatris plants for a week, I am happy to say that the first of five batches are now finished. Now that the first batch is completed, the project’s next step is ready to begin. The process of randomization will be the next step in the project. This step will involve the random selection of achenes from each plant to avoid bias and separation of achenes that are either qualified for being x-rayed or not. Luckily, both groupings will have a role in the project’s studies. X-rayed achenes will inform us about pollination and reproductive outcomes for each head of a Liatris plant. On the other hand, non-x-rayed achenes can be assessed for why they cannot be x-rayed, including what types of damage the achenes have and if any predation occurred toward those achenes. My research question will focus specifically on seed predation, so using the non-x-rayed achenes will be essential. I am still working on a finalized research question relating to seed predation, but seeing the progress made so far has me excited about what will come next in the project and toward finalizing my research question.
I am happy to say that the Liatris Project is off to a good start. After taking inventory of all the Liatris plants this past week, I got to start the cleaning process. A total of 293 Liatris plants have been counted in the inventory, and all have been sorted randomly into 5 different batches. Today, I got to start cleaning the ones in the 1st batch, and while cleaning, I noticed several similarities and differences compared to cleaning Echinacea plants. Overall, I found that Liatris achenes were much easier to extract from the plant than Echinacea achenes, but counting them proved much more challenging. To make things easier, random selection sheets of different numerical ranges were arranged that listed random numbers from left to right down the sheets. Using these sheets, I could randomly pick out a flower head and count the number of achenes associated with that head. I also had to observe if any achenes were missing from each head on a Liatris plant. I recorded the total number of heads per plant and the number of heads with no achenes, some achenes, or all achenes missing. After taking these recordings, I removed all the other achenes present on the Liatris plants and sorted them into an envelope. Any chaff leftover got put into a separate envelope labeled as “chaff.” So far, a handful of plants have been cleaned, but there is still a long way to go.
Today will mark the beginning of a new project that I will conduct analyzing Liatris aspera (Rough Blazing Star). Like with the Echinacea Project, this project will look at reproductive quantities of Liatris and the potential factors for influencing plant reproduction. At the moment, a specific research question is still in the works and the actual project requires some introductory steps that need to be completed. In the lab, I conducted inventory checks for the Liatris plants that have been harvested and made sure their were not any errors in what was taken into inventory. While doing the checking, I had Leah help me make sure everything was accounted for. Trying to do this alone would have been frustrating so I send my absolute thanks for helping me out with this part. As for the next steps in the project, I hope to begin cleaning the Liatris plants next week and start to come up with a potential research question in the near future. Very exciting things to come!
