Hi everyone!

This past week was interesting, as after a long meeting with Dr. Finck and consulting with some of the members of the sustainability club and people who are involved at the Decatur campus, with their native garden, Liauna and I are planning on pivoting our project, as our original idea, while ambitious and beneficial to the university, would need much more coordination between departments, clubs, and different GSU campuses, and thus we are most likely going to pivot to a project that will directly impact the Atlanta campus, after some thoughtful feedback. Our new idea for the project will be a plan for specific buildings to transition to having all native plants, as many of the buildings, especially the admirative buildings, have many non-native plants, as the administration wants to make these buildings “look more attractive”. Our idea is to target either the greenspace, Centennial Hall, or the Petit buildings, as most of these areas are much newer than the rest of campus and boast many plants that are non-native to Georgia.

The Greenspace and Centennial Hall are our two favorite options for our new project idea, as the both have large amounts of space with non-native species and would benefit from a change from non-natives to native species. Our project would include native plant replacements for the non-native species that would have similar looks but be better for the environment.

I am excited for the rest of our service as well, as we are having a larger group tomorrow at the native garden/trail, and we hopefully will be working on removing some invasive azaleas, that are extremely large. Last week, we worked with Kelley Hanada on propagating many more plants, some of which had just re sprouted after Kelley had assumed them to be dead, and hopefully they will regrow after we replanted them.

Below is some of the plants we had propagated, sitting in planter with other plants.

The other photo is the area in-between the Petit buildings, which is a potential location for our project. This area has some non-native flowers and grasses and could benefit from more ecological variety of plant species that are native to the area, especially being around the main center of the science buildings.

Thank you, and see you next week!

Hi all,

Just a little update, due to the storms last week, both Liauna and I were unable to volunteer, however, we were given a task instead and that was to place printed stickers on the plastic stakes for the plants describing when the plants were planted and what the plants are; check the picture below. We were also given the opportunity to help developing an online platform for self-directed learning about Georgia’s native plants. This includes 3-4 hours of using the Educational Platform, which includes logging into the platform, Canvas, and navigating the web portal, reading the materials in a couple of the modules and taking the self-check quizzes. We have not started with that, however we will be in the upcoming week.

For our project, we were inspired to reintroduce the native plant sale at the Decatur campus, as they have a botanical garden and would previously hold these native plant sales through propagation. Instead of just reintroducing the program, we want to change it, as there will be more student involvement from the sustainability club. We would also take inspiration from the SMPP and try to propagate plants that everyday people can have in their yard or at home that are native to Georgia, hopefully with less maintenance. Our project will include a plan that will be given to the university sustainability initiative office and to the sustainability club to gain their insights and hopefully approval for the project. The project will also include a presentation to the class and to the different people involved, also members of the GNPS will be invited as well, to present our findings to the different groups involved.

Our project serves to push the ideals that are most important to the GNPS as we want to promote the spread of native plants over invasives. One of the things I have loved about working with GNPS has been the passion of the members involved to the goal. They also tend to weave in other important ideas within sustainability and native plants, such as environmental justice. Our main source of contact, Kelley Hanada, has shown such a large passion and genuine curiosity about natives and invasives, and seemingly is still continuing to learn things form some of the other members of GNPS, as nobody knows all the answers.

Overall, I hope the weather doesn’t further inhibit our work and we continue to learn from the passionate volunteers and employees of the GNPS

See you next week!

Hi everyone,

Liauna and I had our first workday, after being delayed due to the weather and spring break! We finally got to meet with Kelley Hanada, who we worked for the first half of the day with, and then we met with Jane Trentin for the second half of our workday. With Kelley, he taught us about the propagation techniques that we utilized to split one tray of large Milkweed plants into 7 trays of Milkweed plants, shown below. Milkweed is a plant native to Georgia, and they are host plants for caterpillars and Monarch Butterflys. Liauna and I both really enjoyed the experience, and we were able to chat with Kelley the entire time about his role at GNPS and what got him into this work.

The second half of the workday we spent with Jane and another volunteer removing invasive species and weeds from the nature trail and garden. We were also taught how to distinguish certain plants that look very similar, but one of them was invasive and one was native. This work was not as fun as the first half, as it took a bit of time to learn to distinguish the native plants from the non-natives and invasives, however, we were able to walk through the native garden after and enjoy the beautiful work that the GNPS has put into the garden. Jane was also able to give us some insight into our future work we will be putting into the native garden, as we are planning on removing the non-native azalea plants that were killing some of the native rivercane that used to grow all over the park.

My favorite part of the workday was working with Kelley at the propagation facility and walking through the native garden and seeing the work that was being put into the garden. The most challenging was distinguishing the non-native and invasives from the native plants and making sure we were pulling out the right ones. Overall, it has been a good experience so far and I’m very excited for the next couple of weeks!

See you next week!