Category: information sheet

Resources to Prepare a Plant Diversity Course by Bruce Kirchoff

A free plant diversity course by Bruce Kirchoff is now available to all educators. Here is a summary of his open-access teaching resources available online for download and…

Activity/Presentation: Specimen Stories by Lena Struwe

This teaching module uses the often hidden information about a plant, a place, and a person connected through a herbarium specimen and how students can investigate it. Herbarium…

Manual: Making a plant press with what you’ve got, by Tobias Policha

Introduction to the manual Preparing a Press for a Plant Collection Assignment in a Remote Field Botany Course by Tobias Policha: Many of us include a collections assignment…

Handouts: Weedy Plant Information (toxicity, recipes, field identification), from Lena Struwe’s lab

Lena Struwe’s lab group at Rutgers University has developed several resources about common weeds of northeastern North America and these are shared with the public here.  They were…

Activity: Street Trees Photolog and Ecosystem Service Calculations, by Amy Berkov

In this activity college students go outside and find ten street trees near their home or school, photograph them, identify them to species, and map them on a…

Activity: iNaturalist Observation Project, by Aaron Liston

This iNaturalist plant observation assignment for college students was developed by Aaron Liston from Oregon State University. It was designed to replace a traditional collection assignment. The students…

Activity and Manual: How to take good and bad photos of plants for online plant identification, by Lena Struwe

This is an assignment I use in my Plant Diversity and Evolution class the week before they start their iNaturalist project.   The students learn how to take great…

Handout: The etymology of the word ‘herbarium’, by Kanchi Gandhi

How did the word ‘herbarium’ come to be?  It actually has ancient roots in the deep history of Indo-European languages, and its origin and formation in Latin is…

Activity: Fitting the Earth’s timeline onto your body, by Lena Struwe

Key concept: Understanding and remembering order of events and time line for Earth’s geological and biological history. This is the handout for an exercise I do in my…