PLANT LIFE LAB
PLANT COLLECTION
Plant Collection Reports
For each mounted, identified specimen, do some research and write a short report, including
the following:
ield notes on location, habitat, etc.
enus, species, and family
brief account of the diagnostic features that confirm your ID, and one or more links to
photographs from the above-listed databases confirming your ID.
(If the above information is already in your Plant Collection Log entry for the species,
you don need to repeat it in your report. Your report can consist of just the below.)
nformation on the biology and the ecological niche of the species. Is it native or
introduced? Is it an annual, biennial or perennial? What habitat does it typically
occupy? Does it tend more to the r-selected or the K-selected end of the spectrum?
What morphological, biochemical, or physiological features adapt it to its habitat? Does
it have any agronomic or other economic importance? Are there economically
important species in the same genus or family?
This is not a term paper! Each report can be short, but should collect some quality information
about the species, so you learn something about it other than its name.
Your report must also include citations, to establish a chain of authority.
Sources for your report can include:
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Conservation organizations: Information on their websites may be written by
knowledgeable scientists (but is not the equal of peer-reviewed journals).
Non-profit, academic sites, or crowd-sourced databases,
BONAP and iNaturalist can give a sense of the distribution, although by very different
means.
Government agencies: For example, the USDA Plants Database
(https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/java/) gives information on the distribution and
native/non-native status for many wild plants.
Peer-reviewed journal articles. Try to include 2 or more for each of your reports,
properly cited, with links to the articles. Search for these in Google Scholar or PubMed.
You can do general or key word searches for your species, or you can use the advanced
search function to search within specific journals. There are many botanical journals.
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PLANT LIFE LAB
PLANT COLLECTION
When doing your searches, if you got your genus and species names from the Seek app
or other very current source, be sure to also search for the older name of the species,
such as found in the field guides. If you only use the newer name, you may miss out on
a wealth of older publications.
Please use some discernment and include only articles relevant to the content of this
course (reproduction, pollination, seed biology, pathology, ecology, and economic or
medical value, etc.åe the syllabus for future topics), rather than any old article that
happens to mention the species name somewhere.
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