The day started with a 9AM meeting with Rick Gitar at the Fond du Lac Resource Management center. Rick gave his first lecture to students on plant pressing techniques. The key to taking a good sample is taking good notes and those notes should include the location, types of plants around the area where you took the sample, the soil type, and if possible the genus and family. Common items necessary to pressing the plants includes an array of easy to find materials such as zip lock bags, blotter (thick construction type) paper, cardboard, a China marker to label the newspaper with, and label tags. After Rick told us some different ways to prepare the plant samples we moved on to a group discussion about using the University of Minnesota online library and Christa cleared up some questions we had. Afterwards, we adjourned for lunch and moved back to the Forestry Center to have a videoconference with the other intern team out in Montana, Team SPAW. During the meeting all the interns and mentors introduced themselves and each team discussed their first weeks at the internship. Afterwards, we discussed chapters one and two in “The Ecology of Patterned Boreal Peatlands of Northern Minnesota: A Community Profile” by Paul H. Glaser and then we adjourned for the day.

Wayne Greensky

Rick Gitar, a botanist from Fond du Lac Resource Management, teaching the interns about pressing plants for a Herbarium.