It has been a busy week since arriving back in Laramie, Wyoming from the training session in Chicago, Illinois. I have been working in both the field and the lab. In the field my team and I have been making SOS collections. We are up to eleven collections so far. Our collections vary by site which makes every field day interesting. We go to the mountains in the Laramie Range and the Sierra Nevada Range in addition to the surrounding sage brush step. This past week we went up to Thunder Basin National grassland. It was hot and dry as it has been all summer long. It has been perfect condition for fires which have been burning all around the state. One of my team’s potential SOS collection sites got burned in a recent fire at Glendo State Park in Wyoming. However, it is not all field work for me. As I am stationed out of the University of Wyoming, I also get to participate in research. I have been plating seeds from last year’s SOS collections in agar for germination studies. I have to be very careful to keep all my tools sterilized in order to grow plants and not fungi. It has been exciting to see two sides of the SOS program; the seed collections and the research.