Projects

Current and past projects associated with the Evergreen Natural History Museum.

Birds of Evergreen

Ornithology students at Evergreen created a wiki guide to the birds commonly found on The Evergreen State College campus and surrounding forest. These pages include recordings that students made of bird calls, information on avian life histories, and images. The Birds of Evergreen site is currently only available to Evergreen students.

Flora of the South Puget Sound Prairies

In 2016, The Evergreen State College Press published the first edition of Vascular Plants of the South Sound Prairies, a much-needed reference for plant identification that serves both the public and professionals involved in prairie and oak woodland conservation in the south Puget Sound region. These floristically unique ecosystems in the state of Washington are the focus of ongoing ecological restoration and environmental education efforts. The first edition of the field guide involved over forty students between 2003 and 2016, as well as Evergreen faculty and scientists from another local college and non-profit organization. The end result was an accessible tool for plant identification tailored to these biodiverse ecosystems which did not previously exist. You can purchase a copy from the Evergreen Bookstore.

Students also created a wiki for the plants of the South Puget Sound Prairies, a threatened local ecosystem. Their wiki entries can be seen here . For a longer description of this project, see the 2021 article in Ethnobiology Letters titled “Creation of a Field Guide to Camas Prairie Plants with Undergraduates: Project-Based Learning Combined with Epistemological Decolonization”

The Teaching Gardens

The Teaching Gardens provide The Evergreen State College with a valuable learning tool. They are scattered throughout the campus. Many of these themed gardens include student-designed interpretative panels. See The Teaching Gardens website for more information, maps, and plant lists.

Twig Identification Cards

Under the direction of faculty member Frederica Bowcutt, botany students at The Evergreen State College created plant identification cards for the twigs of thirty common deciduous trees and shrubs found in the Pacific Northwest. The size of playing cards, each one features a general photograph of the twig’s habit and a close-up that shows the axillary bud, leaf scar, lenticels if present, and other distinguishing features. Evergreen alumna Erica Guttman generously provided written descriptions from her booklet Winter in the Woods, which were edited to fit on the cards. Printed on stiff card stock, the glossy cards are designed to be used in the field to learn how to identify these native species in their dormant state. Joe Bettis and Rob Saecker photographed the whole twigs. Museum Fellow Lisa Hintz took the close-up images using an auto-montage microscope. Jackie Argueta served as our graphic artist. Mollee Mullins made helpful editorial comments. All proceeds support the Evergreen Herbarium, the Evergreen Teaching Gardens, and Native Plant Salvage Foundation. You can purchase a set from The Greener Store.