‘This is Cedar Creek?’ I thought to myself as I pulled into the parking lot. I was in front of a small, single-story tan building whose brown windowsills were crying out for a paint job. This was where the discipline of ecosystem ecology was essentially invented in the 1940s by a young graduate student named Raymond Lindeman, and ever since then ecologists at Cedar Creek Natural History Area have been turning out research that ranks among the most important in the field. But this building did not look like a first rate research institution to me. Of course, that is because I was forgetting that when you have 9 square miles of some of the most ecologically diverse land in Minnesota, huge laboratories are not so important. Currently, there are two really large-scale, long-term experiments, known as BioCON and LTER, being run at Cedar Creek, and both of them are examining the implications of biodiversity - the number of different species coexisting in a particular ecosystem. The credits for these experiments are peppered with the big names of ecology, but at the heart of it all lie the interns of Cedar Creek. I was there to work with them and discover the intern experience first hand.

The main building of Cedar Creek, where offices and laboratories are	Working out in the BioCON experiment

This summer about 50 interns are working at Cedar Creek. Most are in their early 20s, biology majors from colleges and universities in nearly 20 different states as well as Canada and the Bahamas. My first exposure to the interns was a conversation I overheard at lunch. To be more exact, it was a lively argument about an unknown plant, as much in Latin as in English, with scientific names being bandied about that sounded to me remarkably like spells from Harry Potter.

“I really think it looks like Solidego canadensis.”
“No way, there’s not a hair on it.”
“I’m telling you, it’s missouriensis.”
“Well, I think it’s Nemoralis.”
“WHAT?!!!”

To do their jobs it is essential that the interns be able to recognize and distinguish the experimental species, so after lunch I was given a crash course on how to identify the different grassland plant species that grow here at Cedar Creek. I learned about the palmate (fan like) and pinnate (feather like) leaves that are found on plants from the legume family. I found out what a clasping auricle (pronounced “oracle”) is – it is the bottom of a grass blade that wraps around and hugs its stem, rather than just being attached to it. I discovered that the grass I like to blow on and make squeak is known as Bromus inermis. And, the sneaking suspicion that I had developed at lunch was confirmed; I was in for far more than I had expected. But, before I had time to steep in the recognition of my botanical ignorance, I hurdled headlong into working with the BioCON crew.

The BioCON experiment examines what role plant biodiversity may play in the future. Different numbers of plant species are grown in small plots of land that are given a high level of nitrogen in the soil and a high level of carbon dioxide in the air (twice as high as in the normal environment!) to simulate what scientists predict the environmental conditions will be in the year 2050. All sorts of data are collected from these plots and the health of the soil and the plants is evaluated. I joined the BioCON interns during harvest week, when swaths of plants are clipped from each plot and the different species are sorted from one another to be dried and later weighed. I was awestruck as I watched the sorters deftly identify even the most diminutive snippets of grass. I became persuaded that the grasses were revealing their identities through some barely perceptible herbaceous communication, so I concentrated with all my mental capacity on the blade between my fingers. There was no distinct aura, no helpful whisper of “Agropyron repens”. I had to ask my table partner for help.

An intern student supervisor double checking a sorting job.	Sorting

Sorting plants for hours may not seem like the most thrilling of tasks, but the BioCONers were a lively crew and amused themselves with chatting, laughing, singing and snacking on candy. This laid back atmosphere is one of the things many interns told me they loved about Cedar Creek. Though the results they were working towards may well be published someday in a prestigious journal, there is no overwhelming sense of pressure to perform. In fact, it is even perfectly acceptable to nickname the experimental plant species. Bouteloua gracilis becomes “Booty”, Schizachyrium scoparium becomes “Skiz”, and so on. We had just finished a stirring rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” when one of the intern supervisors announced that it was time to go clip. Six people rose to leave, and I tagged along.

We drove out to the fields where the experimental plots lay, encircled by tall white pipes that were blowing out CO2 (the control plots were also surrounded by pipes, but these were blowing normal air), and pulled up to circle number 5. The crew members grabbed plastic trays and battery-run clippers that made me think of bear paws with vicious claws, except the would be paws were yellow and plastic. The interns fanned out, each taking a different plot, clipping a 10cm by 1m path through the plants, collecting everything they clipped into a plastic tray and labeling it, and then moving on to a new plot. It looked easy enough, so I offered my helpful services. Very quickly I learned two things: first, when you are running ferocious clippers along the ground you should grab plants by their tops, not their bases (don’t worry, I still have all my fingers); second, even if elevated CO2 levels don’t affect the importance of biodiversity (though results thus far indicate they do) they definitely affect mosquito levels. Attracted to the piped carbon dioxide as they would be to the CO2 respired by any sanguine animal, billowing clouds of mosquitoes swarmed the ring and motivated us all to clip as efficiently as possible. After finishing the ring, we returned to the sorting room, itchy but refreshed from the excursion. We continued to sort for the afternoon until the staff supervisor showed up with a surprise - sumptuous chocolate layer cakes to thank the team for being such hard workers.

I would have happily worked many more days with BioCON, if they had kept feeding me cake, but I was slated to spend the next day with LTER. So, early the next morning 15 interns and I piled into a rickety 1986 suburban – the doors were barely attached and the windows were crusted with mosquito carcasses – and we drove out to some of the LTER experimental plots, known affectionately as “Big Bio”. LTER (which stands for Long Term Ecological Research) examines many of the same things as BIOCON but without the elevated nitrogen and CO2. In other words, it is testing the role of biodiversity here and now. That day we were going to weed, making sure that only the desired experimental species were left in each plot because extra weeds growing would create extra biodiversity and taint the experiment’s results. The sun was rising, golden and hazy, over the expanses of green field, but we were nearly oblivious to its beauty. We were focused on the cold. It was freezing, more like March than June, and a stiff wind was whipping in from the north. We steeled ourselves and started working.

A cold day for weeding	The vehicle of choice at Cedar Creek

The first plot was a breeze. We pulled the smattering of weeds and moved on. When we stopped at the next plot the intern supervisor checked her clipboard and looked up with horror in her eyes. “This is a Lespedeza, Achillea, and Sorghastrum culture,” she announced. From my sorting I knew what all those plants looked like, and when I surveyed the plot I saw almost none of them. “Are you sure?” asked some of the interns, dismayed. The supervisor checked again and nodded; it was true, the plot was almost nothing but weeds. We plunked ourselves down, trying not to squish anything important and started weeding for all we were worth. My knees and back started to ache. My fingers were grimy and began to go numb from the cold. Even the antifreeze running through my Minnesotan veins wasn’t enough to combat the fact that I was not properly dressed for 40-something degree weather. I was getting chilled to the core and having to sniffle furiously to prevent my nose from running all over my face. “What time is it?” I asked. Not even 10 o’clock yet, impossible!

I was about ready to throw in the towel, but all the other interns were working steadily away revealing no signs of needing a break. Ashamed of my wimpiness, I jabbed extra hard at a clump of unwanted grass with my pronged weeding tool and somehow managed to spray a torrent of soil into my face. I plugged on. Not that long after, a cry rose up across the fields that was music to our ears. “Hot cocoa!” Troy, the research coordinator, had arrived bearing two large pots of piping hot chocolate – a gesture that instantly catapulted him to a position high on my list of all time favorite people. Revived by the warmth and the sugar we returned to weeding, discussing our coldest moments and grooving a little to music from a stereo that one girl was wearing like a backpack.

With all this sorting, clipping, and weeding, the work at Cedar Creek may seem more like large-scale gardening than science, but the interns said that they do feel involved in the results that come out of here. “Sure we pretty much do a lot of grunt work,” one girl explained to me, “but we always know what’s going on. They make sure we understand what we’re doing things for.” To promote this understanding, scientists often come out to Cedar Creek specifically to present their research and results to the interns in seminars and symposia. The interns are also given the opportunity to propose an individual research idea and carry out their own experimental work with the help of a member of the Cedar Creek staff. Analyzing the effects of nitrogen on pond invertebrates and measuring the effect of ground compression (from walking on it, for example) on the productivity of different plants are two of the many project ideas that interns told me about. This educational aspect is one of the most important parts of interning at Cedar Creek.