Meet Caitlin

Hi, my name is Caitlin Richards but my friends call me 

 Caity… not Caitie, Kaity, or Kaiti or any of the other ways to spell it.  I’m not 

 bitter about people always spelling my name wrong… ok maybe a little.  I’m a senior majoring in Biology, Environmental Health and Safety, and minoring in Chemistry.   I’m a Scorpio, and my birthday is November 4^th which means every four years the country gives me a president for my birthday…. It’s usually not a very good present.

I like being outside so I enjoy most outside activities; my favorite reasons to be outside are to ski, swim, read under a tree, ride my bike,  hike, cook, and camp.  I have a pretty severe obsession with owls and pretty much anything that has an owl on it, as of this minute I have an owl lunchbox, an owl patch on my backpack, the lock screen on my tablet is an owl, my USB is an owl, and my wallet is an owl with a mustache.  Unfortunately I know that owning an owl as a pet is cruel and unnatural but If I could have any animal as a pet I would have a saw-whet owl, pictured below.  They are about the size of a robin and can fit in your hand.  It would be my dream to have a saw-whet nest in my yard and while it lives in the wild it would let me pet it and I would feed it treats and we would be friends.

 I’m also pretty involved in the environmental justice movement and dedicate a lot of my time to organizations such as the Student Environmental Alliance, Take Back the Tap, and Divest CMU.  I am pretty knowledgeable about a lot of environmental issues but I always love to learn more and talk about it.  I think that one of the most important things about conservation is education, that is why I have developed many programs on things ranging from the basics of reduce, reuse, and recycle  to broad topics like fossil fuels, to specific things like Michigan beach conservation in a specific Michigan county.   I don’t know what I am going to do after college, maybe join a cult and worship a rock with a face, maybe go to grad school, maybe get off the grid and live in the woods and become friends with all the forest animals; I guess time will only tell.

 -Caity

Contributing specimens to the Herbarium

Contributing specimens to the Herbarium

I’ve shared photographs from my summers in the prairie fens, identifying species, collecting specimens, and encounters with wildlife. I’ve shown you how I used the Herbarium to help me identify my specimens. Now it is time I added to the collection for others to utilize in the same and new manners.

Over the course of two field seasons, I collected 1053 specimens for my Master’s Project. They filled an entire cabinet:

This cabinet contains all 1053 pressed specimens I collected in my two year project. On the bottom right are the shelves housing my field journals containing the specimen and location information I had to transcribe into a database to make my herbarium labels.

 I was able to identify 987 specimens to species (290 species total), 53 to genus, 6 to family, and 7 were unidentified. After identifying the specimens, I wasn’t done. I still had to create labels, mount, and accession them to add them to the Herbarium collection. Luckily, I didn’t have to do this alone:

Riley Zionce and Hillary Karbowski mount an Equisetum from the Prairie Fen Biodiversity Project.

Given the large number of specimens, I knew typing up herbarium labels by hand would be insanity. Many specimens were from the same site and sometimes the same area. I believe my fingers would have cramped up and fallen off if I had to repeat that information for multiple species. Plus, every keystroke I made had the possibility of typos that would be hard to spot among 1000+ labels. Instead I utilized a database:

A screen shot of the specimen collection table in my database.

I started with a specimen “Collection” table where I typed every collection number, species name, specimen description, and a plethora of other information from my field journals. Instead of typing in directions to a site for every specimen that I collected at that site, I could link all specimens to a “Sites” table where one set of directions was added for each site. I had several other tables that were also linked to each “Collection” record. When I was finished, I created a query of all the fields I would include on an Herbarium label and exported it into a Microsoft Excel document.

Next I created a mail merge document in Microsoft Word, and linked it to the fields in my query:

A screen shot of the labels form with fields linked to my collection information.

After figuring out the dimensions, font sizes, and the like to get the labels to look like I wanted them, I populated or merged my document with my collection information. There was only one more step before labels could be printed: italicize the scientific names in the merged document. Unfortunately, the limitations of the various Microsoft programs will not allow for the font styles to carry over into a merge. Luckily Hillary saved me and took on the task!

After those final edits, Hillary printed the labels, and Riley joined in the process. The two began mounting the specimens, site by site.

Hillary Karbowski and Riley Zionce mounted Symphyotrichum novae-anglae from Bridge Valley Fen, Oakland County, Michigan (North Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy).

I don’t know about you, but I feel a great satisfaction looking at the near final product of the collection.


-Rachel H