Sophia (pictured left wearing blue) is a summer field technician at Iowa State conducting plant surveys in the prairie pothole region of Minnesota. In the fall, Sophia attends Bemidji State University in Minnesota for wildlife biology, environmental science, and GIS.
Why did you choose Iowa State for your summer research? After a position at a plant nursery in North Dakota fell through due to funding cuts I kept seeking out pollinator and prairie positions and landed on this one. Even though I'm attending school at Bemidji State, I have family in Ankeny and Polk City, so it worked out really well!
What’s the most useful thing that you've learned as a student? Always ask questions. I think school sometimes instills in us that if we don't get it the first time it's not worth the effort, so it's really important to curb that kind of thinking. I also find repetition is a big part of how I learn things, sometimes asking a question is a form of committing something important to memory. The embarrassment of not getting it and asking for help is much less crushing than realizing you've been doing your work the wrong way and have to scrap it.
Why did you choose biology for your major? I knew I loved creatures and that I didn't like handling all the scary chemicals in the lab. The natural world is really unceasing in complexity and allows you to choose how far in you want to delve. I don't think I'll ever run out of living things I want to learn more about. Right now, I'm most interested in the broader version of biology, ecology, which allows me to look at both insects and plants.
Why are you interested in native plants and monarch butterflies? I feel wildlife biology places the most emphasis on large game and birds. While I enjoy both a lot, the work is quite physically taxing and usually focused on one species at a time. I enjoy the smaller-scale aspect of plant and pollinator science that allows me to experience many species at once working in a system that benefits everybody involved. Even though the focus is on monarchs, it's really an umbrella for other prairie plants and butterfly species to benefit from their conservation. It's like learning the language of a new culture so I can help out the village, an amazing thing all around.
What research are you conducting this summer? I'm aiding a grad student project at Iowa State that tracks the different species found on remnant and reconstructed prairies in the prairie pothole region of Minnesota. We place 100-meter transects in the middle of the prairie with nine different points to stop and determine what species are growing there. We can better understand the health of the prairies by what species appear, how many are native or invasive, the depth of plant litter on the ground, and the amount of plant diversity present.
What skills did you gain during this experience? My prairie plant identification skills, including sedges and grasses have increased tenfold since I started. In all honesty, when we were first scouting location access to the prairie sites I thought at that point I would never be strong enough to walk around that much in the heat and insects. Our first transect took an hour and a half. By the end of our field season, we were finishing transects in almost under a half-hour, sometimes twenty minutes.
What new things did you learn? Grasses don't have much presence in plant courses, for good reason. They are notoriously hard to identify with minute differences that may need a magnifying glass in order to see. The importance of grass is an unavoidable fact of the prairie, if we were to log good data, we would have to learn to ID grass. It was an uphill battle of reading old taxonomy books and keys that made little sense, but for me it started to click when we went to a plant ID'ing workshop held at the Morris USFWS wetland management office. Using less technical words really helped me get it. For example, Smooth brome's sheath looks like a "disco collar", and Kentucky bluegrass has "train tracks" going up the vein of the blade. I never would've thought I would be able to identify something so homogenous as grass during this season.
How can Iowans help monarch butterflies? Planting milkweed is the best way to directly help butterflies. A garden isn't even needed to do so. The first time I saw milkweed as a kid, it was flowering in the ditch alongside the train tracks and garage units of an apartment. I think some people feel they aren't able to do anything because they don't have immediate access to a garden. While fostering a garden that provides the resources needed to aid monarchs is the most ideal solution, we shouldn't underestimate the presence of a milkweed in a roadside ditch or city courtyard. We should extend an olive branch to all butterflies, especially ones who have lost their natural habitat and are using what is left on human land to survive.
