2025 Capstone Project

September, 2025
by Carolyn Trachtova, Class of 2025

We wanted to share an enlightening response from a new MMN intern, having just completed their Capstone project & submitted this feedback in the survey. See the response below from Carolyn Trachtova, class of 2025.

Project Overview

I participated in the BioBlitz in Little Creve Coeur Ecological Area. We went to Little Creve Coeur and added pictures and observations of the plant and animal life of the area in iNaturalist. It was part of the City Nature Challenge that is held around the world in April. The goal was to document nature from all corners of the globe. I believe there were thousands of areas/cities participating.

Skills & Experiences Gained in Training

The first thing that I remembered was how important it is when trying to identify flowers or plants, that you have to observe all aspects of a flower, from top to bottom. People tend to focus on just the flower, but to really dig in and understand what you are looking at, you need to look carefully at the leaves at the top and at the bottom.

This was particularly true of Philadelphia fleabane, which I found at LCC. When we were identifying different fleabanes, we had to look at the leaves at the top and closer to the root. We had to look at the petiole size, the placement of the leaves, whether they had teeth or not, whether the branching is single or compound.

The time of year of growth is important as well. For example, I found fleabane at LCC. To me, it looked really similar to heath aster. But I know the fleabane is hairy, and it grows in April and June, whereas the aster blossoms a bit later in August and fall.

I also thought a lot about habitat during the event. The area was so diverse in that it had prairie, wetland, and woodland areas. I didn’t get to see the prairie because I was really interested in exploring the wetland.

Thanks to my training, I am constantly asking myself – is this a woodland or a forest? Learning the difference between the two was the first of many ‘aha’ moments. I still get them mixed up from time to time, but the base is there – a forest is at least 80% coverage by the tree canopy, so there’s not much diversity in what’s growing on the ground. A woodland has less canopy cover so there is a greater variety of undergrowth.

But I also remembered that Mark said that you can’t cut down trees and make a woodland because of the rest of the ecological features of the area. So, when I looked at LCC, it seemed like a woodland, but since it was wetland first, then sports fields, and then back to a wetland, it made me wonder if the wooded spaces were part of the wetland or revived woodland. In any case, I wanted to learn more about the process of how the area was reverted to its natural state – such an amazing feat!

Skills & Experiences Gained in Capstone Project

I had the good luck of walking with some amazing birders. Mary Dueren was a walking guidebook of bird calls and bird behavior. I was intrigued by her ability to hear the “words in the calls” – which I learned later is called bird mnemonics. I have a very hard time hearing the words in the calls or remembering them using words – other than ‘whip – or – will’ and ‘bob – white’. Bird behavior was also interesting – Mary pointed out the protective versus mating behavior of a woodpecker.

Documenting in iNaturalist was something I got better at on this project as well. I tried it during a very early event, and using it made me very nervous. I felt like I was going to mess up someone’s research by misidentifying something, and that I didn’t have enough knowledge to identify anything anyway. At LCC, I had more time to play with it and became familiar with the functions. Thanks to training and my growing knowledge, I felt more confident in helping the app accurately identify my pictures. What I should have done more is take several pictures from different angles. I was a little too eager to collect and not properly document my subjects with multiple angles

Finally, I learned that to really experience birding as it should be experienced, you need binoculars. I didn’t expect to want to focus on finding the birds, so I didn’t bring my father’s binoculars from 1950, but I wished I had. Although you should be able to identify some birds with a silhouette, I’m not quite there yet. I look forward to improving my birding skills in terms of learning calls and basic features/behaviors.

What comes next?

I am keen to get more people using iNaturalist. I think it’s a wonderful tool that shouldn’t be intimidating to use. I think to use it well, it needs a little training, so I ‘d like to get better at using it and then train others to use it well. I think this is an important tool for documenting the world around us and keeping track of the nature we see every day around us. This information can be used for research related to preservation of habitat, conservation, and generally just warning bells when the ecosystem is thriving or not, which can lead us to helping legislate for protected areas and save members of our natural community.

I’m also interested in how I could use iNaturalist in conjunction with blitz type activities with immigrant and refugee populations. I am very interested in researching how having a knowledge of the natural world helps refugees, migrants, and immigrants feel more at home in their host country. I think iNaturalist and other identification tools would be a first step in connecting with nature and naming what they see. It would be useful in both urban natural spaces as well as more diverse parks, conservation areas, etc. Part of this journey though relates to building my own knowledge and skills so I can more easily help students make connections to these natural spaces by being able to more quickly identify plants and birds.

Final Reflections
I am one of the people in this program that does not have a base in science of any sort. It’s my desire to expand my knowledge and give back to nature that led me to the Master Naturalist program. I often feel intimidated by others’ knowledge and years of being a naturalist or science educator. But I could see from this one trip that even though there was a lot of information in MMN to digest in 5 months, I processed some of it and I have grown in my knowledge.

To me, being a Master Naturalist is just that – constantly balancing between learning and application of that knowledge. I look forward to continuing to grow as a Missouri Master Naturalist and someday leading my own group through LCC describing bird calls!

Sierra Club Outing