Epiphyte project.

The lab for my Plant Ecology course involves a lab exam and a herbarium-specimen collection project, collectively responsible for 18% of the course's final grade. For the more adventurous, though, there's another option: we can choose to skip either the exam or the herbarium project, if we replace them with an original project of our own design. It has to take about the same amount of time as the assignment(s) it replaces, and it must involve some plant identification, but beyond that pretty much anything goes.

Naturally, this struck me as a good idea. (Overachiever? Who, me?) Not only is botanical fieldwork a fairly sure recipe for a happy Alexa, one of my explicitly-stated goals for this trip is to get acquainted with the local flora, and an original project is sure to be both more interesting and more fun than a prescribed one and an exam. I didn't have any particular ideas at first, but the teaching fellow who runs the lab apparently wasn't going to let that stop me: he helped me get some ideas, reassured me that starting out without a clue which plant is which wouldn't hurt me (projects are for learning!), and generally got me on the right track.

The result of these deliberations is a research project, of sorts: I'm going to take a survey of the epiphytes in the Dunedin Botanic Garden and draw up a dichotomous key and an illustrated field guide. It will involve a good deal of field work (read: walking every path in the Garden and taking a cartload of notes), a fair amount of research, and a great deal of botanical drawing. If all goes well, I may even be able to make it available to the public -- the Garden's staff and patrons just might find a tailor-made field guide useful.

What's more, OSU strongly encourages undergraduate research, and this may very well fall under that umbrella. Who knows -- maybe I didn't lose the chance for research when I took of to Dunedin after all.