New member of the team!

The day has come for you to meet one of the new members of the Herbarium family! My name is Heather, and I joined Dr. Monfils and the rest of the team to begin working on my Master’s in May, and since then have been learning all new and exciting information, along with taking two classes this semester, Wetland Plants and Molecular Ecology.

But let’s start with a little background.  I was born at a very young age (about 0), and grew up in Maine, which is where I still call home base.  I enjoyed travelling, warmth, and the coastline, so I moved to Florida where I spent four years completing my undergraduate degree in Biology with a concentration in Marine Biology.  While there, I received a botany scholarship and as a requirement, completed my senior research project in a botanical subject area (seaweed counts, right?). Once I had my fill of the warm weather, I moved back up north to Boston, where I began my career working in the biological sciences.

I was fortunate enough to land a job in my field (albeit part time) shortly after graduation, and at an aquarium that I had always dreamed of working for. I worked for roughly a year with them as an educator, talking to people both in the Aquarium and in schools about ocean life.  To gain more skills, I happily volunteered there once a week as an aquarist.  

Getting a juvenile epaulette shark (Hemiscyllium ocellatum)
from the shark nursery ready for a live animal presentation 

Large exhibits require a little more dedication in
cleaning than your average home fish tank

Seeing as how I enjoyed variety, I also worked two days a week at a (warm) butterfly garden at a museum, where I educated visitors about butterflies, cared for the plants, and gained more botanical skills to add to those that I already had.

The atlas moth (Attacus atlas) is the world's largest moth!

After nearly a year of working sometimes 7 days a week and barely scraping by in the busy city, I decided to spend some of the best six months of my life as a full time seal pup rescue and rehab volunteer at a little seal sanctuary in the quiet northwest corner of Ireland. While involved with marine mammals, I flew over to the Moray Firth in Scotland for 10 days to volunteer with a cetacean research and rescue group and learn some practical field research skills.  After those fantastic 10 days, I knew for a fact that even though I loved education, horticulture, and animal husbandry, I loved research best of all and contributing to the world’s scientific knowledge.

A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) mother and her very young calf

Rescuing a premature grey seal (Halochoerus grypus)
from the beach on a typical Irish summer day

So here I am, working with plants again! As I wanted to get more involved with wetland and freshwater ecosystem plant life, what better place to go next than Michigan. Since many of the biological jobs I applied to in the past (and believe me, there were a plethora of them) required molecular lab skills, I wanted to focus on that area in while obtaining my degree.  When an exciting opportunity presented itself to me, I joined Dr. Monfils in her plant systematics research with the Cyperaceae.  We will have to see what the next couple of years will bring, but I can tell you now that I am already enjoying myself immensely and am looking forward to working as part of this team in the CMC herbarium and plant systematics lab. 

Schoenoplectus americanus, present at the salt marsh we visited in the Wetland Plants class

Sláinte!

~ Heather

A New Term and New Tasks

After I left for my study abroad trip in July, Abigail fulfilled our goal of digitizing the entire Herbarium collection. The long hours we put into completing that task and the number of books on tape we listened to while bar-coding are innumerable.

Now we have a new task, Foldering, and Abigail has gone and graduated, leaving me to complete this myself.

The process is simple: All of the specimens will be placed within two folders, one, a thick, protective folder that has a typed label stating the Family and Genus, the other a thin folder labeled with the species name.

This task is not nearly as slow as Digitization, a process which required the handling of each individual specimen in the collection, but for accuracy's sake the names in our completed database are being run through iPlantCollaborative.org and Tropicos.org again. This takes some time to do but is necessary to ensure that what species we have in the cabinets matches what species we have in the database, and to again verify the specimens' names.

Running the species names also sheds light on who named the species, information we want to include in the labels we print for the folders. 

With my graduation date coming up soon, my efforts in getting an informational poster and pamphlet for the Herbarium have doubled. The content of these needs to be edited and approved by Dr. Monfils by mid-October, after which I will work with a few departments on campus to get them formatted and printed before December.

I also have been given the honor of working closely with Hillary. Hillary is currently taking the Wetland Plants course with Dr. Monfils and helps Rachel with her research.
Hillary's plant identification skills are far superior to mine and her botanical knowledge has been extremely helpful over the past few weeks. Her keen understanding of plants assures me that I will be leaving the Herbarium in good hands.

Still, there are a few key tasks that are essential to the running of the Herbarium that I must show Hillary. We will be going, step by step, through the tasks that are important to processing incoming material. Along the way, we will be testing the accuracy and the clarity of the protocols that have been written for each of these steps.

The itinerary for Herbarium training:
Drying and Freezing, Mounting, Digitizing, Updating the Database, and Filing. 

Together we also have the goal of Foldering the entire collection by the end of the summer. 

We are geared up for quite a busy semester!

Peace. Love. Plants.
Sascha