Week 4: Personal Contributions

This week was a big week, as I dove into destructive sampling at the lab and finished a big project I was working on. At the lab, we’re working with the invasive species wavyleaf basketgrass so we can determine what factors make it such a good invader. We have 77 small pots of this plant that came from different locations in Virginia and germinated at different times. We take measurements every 10 days post germination, and at 50 days, which many of the plants are now reaching, I destructively sample them. This entails cutting the leaves from the stems and the stems from the roots, weighing all for parts for their wet weight mass, then putting them in a drying oven overnight and getting the dry weight the next day to determine the biomass. This process is very meticulous and requires a lot of routine and organization, or else the data could be skewed. Luckily, I am a person who is good at giving attention to detail and loves organization and routine. As is usually the case, the more effort you put in to collecting and organizing the data, the easier it is to analyze it later. I’m hoping my efforts will allow the team to have an easier time later.

The project I finished was compiling lists of invasive species from the Mid-Atlantic states in Excel. It sounds simple, but not every state had a list on their state department website that explicitly said “here are all of our invasive plants.” Any list I found on a non-government website had to be checked for credibility. Some of the lists were 5-10 years old, which meant I had to dig to see if there was a more updated list somewhere else. After I made separate Excel sheets for each state, my boss asked me to make one masterlist that showed all the states and what plants they considered invasive. This was a very slow process, but I finished it yesterday and there were over 400 plant species listed! I knew that the number and overall threat of invasives increases each year, but it was almost shocking to see that there were so many in just the Mid-Atlantic states. As far as I know, no one else has compiled a list like this before, so I hope that this will help the VADCR in its risk assessment of invasive plant species as well any other corresponding department in other states doing similar research.