I
became interested in the topic of ecological restoration through personal
experiences in my life. Growing up in a town just over an hour away from D.C. I
have seen my community transform from a rural setting to a commuter town. With
this change has come rapid development and the green spaces I knew and loved
growing up have steadily been turned into new houses, restaurants, and shopping
centers. This has inspired me to investigate how these lands can be restored to
their former glory. In America, grasslands are one of the most threatened ecosystems
out there. Because of this, I began reading literature specifically about
grassland restoration techniques and found a relatively new method being
researched, the herbicide protection pod (HPP).
The HPP was developed to
protect desired grass seeds from herbicide so grasslands can be reseeded and
treated with herbicide simultaneously, a method that could not be done in the
past. The herbicide must be sprayed to combat invasive grass species which
out-compete the native seedlings and dominate the ecosystem, decreasing
biodiversity and chance for wildfires. My research expanded on the previous
work which focused exclusively on grass seed and asked the question, can the
HPP be applied to other plant groups like wildflowers, without negatively
effecting seedling growth? If the answer was yes, the HPP could potentially be
used in other ecosystems where invasive species were out competing the natives.
To test the effects on wildflower seedlings, I planted several replicates of
bare seed and several replicates of seed incorporated in the HPP. My daily
tasks were simply to water the seeds several times a day, and make sure no
other factors could be confounding the effect of the HPP. Over the course of
this project I learned that a lot of things can and will go wrong and you must always
be paying attention, and willing to be persistent.
I
also learned how hugely important initial study design is. Knowing what I know
now, I would have changed several things to make my results easier to interpret
and analyze. Overall, I’m proud of what I accomplished and will take what I
learned forward with me as I aim to find a career in ecological restoration
research
