Working in Dr. Jon Bakker’s Terrestrial Restoration Ecology Lab, I was able to assist one of his doctoral students, Natalie Schmidt, in her study of Castilleja levisecta, or golden paintbrush, a native of the prairies of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. We applied heavy isotopes of Nitrogen and Carbon to the host plants, and tracked their movement into the paintbrush. I presented some preliminary findings at the 2015 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. The abstract I submitted to the symposium and the slides I presented are below.

Castilleja levisecta (CALE) is a threatened, hemiparasitic angiosperm, endemic to Pacific Northwest prairie ecosystems. Like other parasitic plants, CALE forms haustoria: root structures that connect the xylems of the two plants together. CALE then uses this connection to steal nutrients from the host plant to assist its own growth, without killing the host. While it is known that CALE will form haustorial connections with a number of host species, the quantities and timing of specific nutrients taken from the host plants remains a mystery. How old does CALE have to be before optimum nutrient uptake occurs? How does the chemical profile of the host plant change CALE’s growth rate and chemical profile, and are there tertiary effects on pollinators and herbivores that use CALE as their food source or habitat? We cannot begin to answer these questions until we know the basics of nutrient transfer from host to CALE. In this pilot study, we have labeled host plants with heavy isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, to track the length of time it takes CALE to acquire those nutrients via the haustoria, and the amount of each nutrient acquired from the host. We planted over 70 pairs of CALE and Eriophyllum lanatum (ERLA), one of CALE’s known host species. The roots of each seedling were planted across each other, to encourage haustorial connections to form. After several weeks of growth in pairs, heavy isotopes were applied to ERLA with the expectation that they would be taken up by CALE. Both plants were later dried and ground up for analysis of heavy isotope content. Analysis of these data will give us a better understanding of the timing and quantity of host nutrient uptake by CALE. This information will be used to inform efforts to restore and conserve populations of this threatened species.

This was a mock research proposal created for a class in Landscape Ecology. I’m not a big fan of the monorail, and thought it might be neat to study replacing it with an elevated green space like High Line Park in New York. We’d just learned about the modeling program HexSim, so I proposed using it to model pollinator behavior in the Pollinator Pathway on Capital Hill, then applying those models to a greenified monorail, aka Greenrail. Below are my presentation slides, followed by the proposal paper.

For an introductory class in soils science, I collected and analyzed soil samples from my own backyard as well as my grandmother’s house in Kirkland, and my parents’ house in Bothell. I compared soil color, texture, and horizons, measured pH, calculated bulk density, and used a muffle furnace to extract moisture and estimate organic material.