Download Lab Assignment for

Lab Assignment for
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Cyber-Herbarium Project
This project is intended to expand your “plant awareness” from crop plants encountered at
the market outwards to those plants you might encounter on walks and other outings.
Today and next week, we will learn how to use a variety of plant taxonomic keys to
determine the species of wild plants growing locally. We will collaborate to create a
collection of electronic herbarium sheets for these plants and also assemble some
interesting facts about the collected plants.
Learning goals include:
-
developing close observation skills,
-
developing initial skills with navigating taxonomic keys,
-
giving you some idea about which plant taxonomy books you might want to own or use
in the future,
-
learning to remain calm and fearless in the face of horrendously intimidating botanical
terminology (What the heck is an involucral bract anyway?),
-
learning some of this new terminology for plant structures as part of using the keys (It is
a member of a group of modified leaves subtending an inflorescence*),
-
developing a sense for local plant families,
-
appreciating the environmental variability of plant development and structures, and
-
smelling and seeing some bona-fide plant secondary metabolites.
* Now, look up inflorescence, and maybe also subtending
Assignment:
Create and post a cyber-herbarium sheet for a minimum of five plant species on the SAKAI
Cyber Herbarium Wiki site by Monday, October 7th. Your herbarium sheet must be unique
(i.e. not for a plant species that has been posted before) and complete (see instructions
below) to receive maximum credit (six points per sheet, need a total of 30 points minimum;
additional points are possible if you would like to do more and will add to the point base for
the assignment).
Help with plant identification will be available during lab on Thursday, September 9 th;
Thursday, September 16th; during lecture time on Friday, October 1rst; and during office
hours. Plant keys will be available in my comp lab (B217) during regular class hours for the
duration of the assignment.
Cyber Herbarium Step-by-Step Instructions:
1. If you already know that you are planning to collect a certain species, make an entry for
that species into the Wiki straight away to reserve that species for yourself.
2. Collect your plants:
a. Please don’t take plants from places where you will get in trouble (most places
on campus; private yards without permission of the owner).
b. Take with you:
i. A plastic bag to keep your plant fresh in. You might want to take several
bags, so that you don’t get confused about which plant samples are from
one species. Putting a moist paper towel into the bag can be a good idea
on warm, dry days, or if it will take you a while to get your plant back to a
place where you can key it out and scan it.
ii. A knife or scissors. Some plant stems can be highly lignified and tough
to pick.
iii. A digital camera to get an in situ shot of the plant. In addition to making
a nice addition to your herbarium entry, in situ photographs can be helpful
in reminding yourself about species characteristics that you cannot
document in your collected samples. This is especially important for large
plants, which you cannot collect in their entirety. Examples pictures
include: pictures that give a sense of the size of the plant, bark texture
pictures for trees, overall tree shape, branching patterns, arrangement of
flowers on a large flowering plant, huge leaves that wouldn’t fit on a
scanner.
iv. A notebook to record:
1. the location from which you collected,
2. the date,
3. any observations that you can’t capture by sampling or
photographs
4. specifics you need for your herbarium sheet (see below)
5. any thoughts or questions that occur to you in the field that we
might want to talk about in class.
c. Collect:
i. flowers, if the plant is in flower. If possible, take some in different stages
of maturity (buds, open flowers, senescing flowers, seed heads, fruits).
ii. stems that show the arrangement of leaves (alternate, opposite,
whorled?), buds, and branching patterns
iii. entire leaves from various places on the plant (especially important if the
basal and apical leaves are of very different shape or size, or if there are
leaves of various shapes or color on the same plant)
iv. fruits and seeds, if there are any
d. Collect some more.
Just incase some the species you are bringing home have already been claimed
by others by the time you figure out what you’ve got and make your Wiki entry.
e. Store plants you can’t key out and process immediately.
You can blow some air into your plastic bag, then tie the top. Label the bag or
bags with your name and “Bio 360” and put them in the cold room on the third
floor of Steffee (access from B306 or B312).
3. Key out your plants to species.
I’m happy to help with this during the times designated above.
4. Check on the Wiki: Is there already an entry for this species?
If not: Make your Wiki entry now, so that nobody else claims your species.
5. Scan your collected materials.
o
There is a scanner available in B212, there are also scanners in other locations
around campus.
o
Please be considerate: don’t scrape hard plant parts across the scanner surface
in a way that could scratch it, and please be meticulous about cleaning up after
yourself.
o
Arrange your plant materials flat on the scanner bed. It may be helpful to tape
stubborn structures onto a white piece of cardboard with clear tape, before
placing the plant on the scanner. Make sure that identifying structures are not
oddly folded or covered up.
o
Scan a ruler or printed-out scale bar with each of your plant samples. This will
allow viewers of your file determine what size the plant is, even if you end up
shrinking or expanding the image during processing.
o
Don’t forget to save your scanned images.
6. Research the herbarium information for your plant. This should include:
a. common name(s)
b. scientific name(s)
c. plant family
d. collection date
e. collection location
f.
height of the plant
g. natural range of the plant
h. frequency of plant in this geographic area (is it frequent, locally abundant, rare,
endangered? – if the latter is the case, that’s a big oops! – if you do encounter
endangered plants, please only document them through photographs and forego
collecting)
i.
interesting fact(s) about this plant: Human uses, ecological function, natural
history, plant lore
j.
observations on collection location:
i. Was this the only plant of this kind (hopefully not!)? If not, how many
others do you think there were?
ii. Growth environment: light/shade, dry/wet, compacted/loose soil, plant
neighbors, other observations?
7. Enter the information from 6. into the Wiki. Then create a PowerPoint Herbarium Sheet
for the plant:
a. Download the PowerPoint file for Cyber Herbarium Sheets from Sakai.
b. Save the File as “Scientific Plant Name_Your Name”.
c. Replace the Information in the labeling text box by the appropriate entries. If you
just select the text for each entry and then type in the information, this will result
in uniform labeling text formatting for all of our herbarium sheets. For plants with
many common names, just pick the one you like best. You can give the full list of
common names on the Wiki entry, but we probably shouldn’t clutter up the actual
Herbarium Sheets with all of them.
d. Import your scanned plant image.
e. Feel free to move the text box with the labeling info around to best fit with
maximum size image display for your plant.
f.
Save and upload your file to SAKAI, post a link to the file to the Cyber Herbarium.