Flames and flora; A student's journey

Natural Resources student balances herbarium work and plant preservation with aspiring career as firefighter

In a narrow aisle of a cement-floored room at the bottom of University of Idaho’s Mines Building, Eika Willis holds a flower pressed on a paper page.

The delphinium, bright purple even in the room’s subdued light, is a native of Idaho’s spring hillsides.

Willis, who graduates this semester with a bachelor’s in ecology, has had ample time to discover the names of flowers, weeds and other dryland vegetation in her two-and-a-half years as a steward of U of I’s Stillinger Herbarium.

She was hired as a freshman and has since learned every job, and many of the plants, in the herbarium’s vast collection, said herbarium manager Kai Battenberg.

“She can do everything from collect plants, dry and preserve them, mount and enter the data,” Battenberg said. “She will be hard to replace.”

Willis’ was hired as a full-time fire manager with the Forest Service when she returns to her hometown of Bonners Ferry. Her U of I experience, like Palouse loam, forms a foundation that will allow her to flourish in multiple fields after graduation.

“The hands-on experience I got here was unprecedented, and it is one of the reasons I enrolled at U of I in the first place,” Willis said.

At Idaho’s premier herbarium, established in 1892 and housing more than 200,000 plants and fungi, Willis spends hours preparing specimens by gently moving plants that were pressed and dried in the field to a glass plate. They are smeared with acid-free archival glue and affixed to thick preservation paper. 

“This is really expensive adhesive that doesn’t hurt the plants so they can be stored for a long time,” Willis said. 

The plants’ name — family, genus and species — along with notes on where they were collected, are added to a small placard. The specimen is photographed and given a barcode before the information is logged in the herbarium’s digital data bank. Researchers and plant lovers can view specimens in person or online.

I got hands-on learning in every single one of my classes.Eika Willis, ecology student

The purple delphinium was collected on Moscow Mountain in the late 1800s, Willis said. “Some of the plants in this collection were picked more than a century ago.” 

In addition to her tenure at the herbarium, Willis’ U of I education includes a stint as College of Natural Resources ambassador. She also plans, manages and monitors prescribed burns on public and private lands with forestry Professor Heather Heward. One of her projects included using fire to preserve native Palouse Prairie.

“Eika has found a deep interest in making fire a more accessible tool to a valuable space,” Heward said. “She will use her fire experience and her knowledge of plants to help landowners come up with a plan for protecting this important prairie remnant.”

Growing up in rural Bonners Ferry, Willis said collecting firewood was a seasonal family tradition.

“We heated with wood, so yeah, we went out every fall to get the winter’s firewood supply,” she said.

At U of I, she gravitated to the VandalJacks logger sports team where, along with a coterie of student lumberjack athletes, she competes with chainsaws, crosscut saws and climbs poles against a clock to ring a bell on the top, before returning safely to the ground.

“It’s definitely a unique experience,” she said.

At Stillinger, Idaho’s official plant repository, she likes reading the old labels attached to specimens. Each of them is written by a collector and affords historical background and insight into the people behind the plants.

“They provide a glimpse into the personality of people who were out there gathering plants, sometimes a hundred years ago,” she said. “From the labels, you can see what kind of person they were.”

Some of the labels are serious, furnishing only placenames and dates. Others are whimsical, poetically describing the landscape where the plants were collected along with small details of the collectors’ lives.

Willis said she came to U of I primarily because of scholarships and affordability, but quickly realized the small classes and pragmatic approach of professors were invaluable.

“I got hands-on learning in every single one of my classes,” she said. “We went on field trips and learned from professionals working in these occupations. I got insight into other people’s careers and the type of work they do, which really prepared me for life after college.”

Article by Ralph Bartholdt, University Communications

Photos by Garrett Britton, University Visual Productions

Published in November, 2024