Greetings from Wyoming!

With the fieldwork just about complete, the time has come to box up all those pressed voucher specimens and send them off to various herbariums. Keeping all the components of each collection straight is a bit of a challenge, since there are over 50 different collections at this point. Now I am finally getting a handle on exactly what we brought in this year.

It’s amazing to look through the pressed specimens and see the cross-section of Wyoming and northern Colorado plants and the many interesting places we visited this summer. It would be interesting to compile the SOS data in a way that would let you see the range for plants all across the West, probably using the data from herbarium specimens. The Rocky Mountain Herbarium here at the University of Wyoming already has a web-based map of its collections, which allows to search by species and see where you’re most likely to find them. That has been an invaluable tool for seed-hunting this year. Hopefully the specimens we collected will be additional data.

Next up, DNA lab work! Should be interesting!

Cheers,
Abby D.