Anna Wassel
Technician
“As a kid, my favorite thing to do was run around my backyard and catch frogs. My parents would always make me leave them outside when it was time to come in. It was a regular occurrence for me to cry myself to sleep about leaving the frogs. I've always been kind of outdoorsy.”
Have your research interests evolved at all?
“A bit. I like forests and I like forest structure, general ecology stuff. I really like plants in the Fabaceae family. That's the bean family. Largely just because I think they're all adorable. They have the cutest compound leaves and I just love them. But—they're also nitrogen-fixing plants, so they play an interesting role in ecology and restoration. We don't actually know as much about them as we used to think that we knew.”
Has there been a rewarding or affirming moment this summer?
“I like it when we see [a tree] we haven't seen in a while or we haven't seen before and we get to try to ID it. We had something in a plot the other day that in the past they had identified as Pawpaw, and we're like,”There is no way on this green earth that that’s Pawpaw.” So we had to figure out what it was. And we didn't get a definite answer, but I really enjoy that process of going through the mental lists and trying to figure out what's possible and what's not possible. It’s so much fun and I love getting it right. That's always affirming. We're working with woody species, but I like walking around and recognizing some of the herbaceous species that I've worked with in the past. I correctly identified a Senna plant the other day, which I was really excited about!”