Final day at CBG

Friday was my last day at the Chicago Botanic Garden (sniff). I bid a final farewell to the wonderful volunteers and cleaned out all of the miscellaneous papers in my desk, including an article about the top ten bagel restaurants in Chicago.

One great Friday accomplishment was finalizing new driving maps with Lindsey. During the field season, we drive to many remnants, restorations, and experimental plots between Kensington and Hoffman, so a map is helpful for finding sites and plotting efficient routes. We crafted two versions, one with the Echinacea sites that we visit frequently and one more complicated map that includes all the sites for the ENRTF project. The previous version of the driving map was missing some remnant sites like Dog, so we made sure to include all of the places that we visit regularly. On the back, we listed the site abbreviations and full names. I think I’ve been to all of the sites on the Echinacea map, but I haven’t seen most of the newly added ENRTF sites. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to visit some of them next week in Minnesota!

Lindsey shares the secrets of lamination

Our crowning achievement was laminating the new maps. I had never used a laminator machine before, but fortunately Lindsey is an expert, and she taught me the tricks of the trade. We now have a stack of shiny new driving maps, and I’m very excited to try them out!

This past week, Lindsey and I have been organizing the lab so it will be easy for volunteers to find what they need during the summer. I’ve also documented the status of remnant Liatris and Echinacea harvested from 2020-2022. The locations of data, physical specimens, and datasheets are recorded in readMe files in Dropbox. I’ve also updated all of the demap protocols and saved them in the demap repo in a new folder called learnDemap. Hopefully, it will ease the learning curve for future demappers.

Status of remnant Liatris: