Some admirable collections from 2018/19 to inspire you

Please do email me or pop in to OJ16, if you have questions or fancy a chat about any of this. This year we have lab space dedicated to this assignment - which is great! - so you will usually be able to use the microscopes, books and other equipment whenever you like (weekdays, usually 8am-5ish pm).  Do bring your specimens in - naturally I am always keen to see all your interesting finds, but I can also start you off on how to identify and preserve them (or alternatively I can disappear off and leave you in peace to concentrate, if you prefer).
Good luck, have fun, start now - Rhiannon 

One of last year's excellent Hymenoptera collections

Understandably, you may like to see some previous collections for inspiration. But unsurprisingly, the best collections are usually treasured by their owners (they really are), and taken home. I know some people have even brought them back out to impress at job and placement interviews (with success). So in lieu of seeing some of the best from last year in person, here are some photos.

Below is a spider collection which was given a First. It looks really good, doesn't it. Looking good isn't everything, of course. But it does give a good first impression that this student must have put in some consistent effort with everything else. That they've preserved and presented the specimens so carefully gives you confidence they've been thorough about collecting and identifying them. The taxonomically logical arrangement helps make Order out of Chaos for anyone looking at it (the most closely related species positioned next to each other).

Envisage a great looking collection from the start, and it will help you think about what you need to do to achieve that - the number of specimens, the types of places you'll need to go, the information to collect there, the method of preservation you'll need to use, etc.

Plus, if you have a final object in mind, it can help you realise the importance of time management. Last year I saw several people who'd put in huge effort collecting and identifying some amazing lichens, but left themselves no time to pull everything together at the end. They'd not given it much thought, and their last-minute presentation lost them marks that would have added up to an even better grade. Which was frustrating and a shame. So don't let this happen to you!

(This label isn't perfect but it's pretty much there)

The spider-collector cemented their good mark with an excellent monograph (given the equivalent of 80%). Wow (you may say) - how do I get such a good mark? Well, it sounds obvious but it really is this simple: Do What You're Asked To Do. (In this example, the marker noted the monograph "provided a good introduction to the taxonomic group, including the key features of the order and families from the collection." That's what the mark scheme required, and that's what the student did - and so they got a good mark. I know. It sounds bizarrely straightforward).

Handily, this assignment provides a quite specific break-down of what you need to do well for each element. (Perhaps it's easier to see how to get a good mark than when you're just given a single sentence title for an essay). The information is there in the materials you're given by Katy, so do read them. I like to think there's a lot of help in this blog too, and I will try to keep updating it this term.

Look at the artfully displayed and resolutely unmouldy Polypody fern above, from another collection that was given a First. This student was praised for the good quality, correctly identified and suitably diverse set of specimens. But crucially, they got extra-high marks for their monograph and field diary (the marker's comment said "Good detail and evidence of planning. Location photos and plant photos useful, as are sketch diagrams. Very good detailed notes from field, and for identification"). So that's another top tip: go and buy a notebook as the first thing you do, and record what you're doing as you go along. The notebook demonstrates your learning, but is also a way of keeping everything in order - you can draw on your notes to identify specimens, complete your labels, and help you write your monograph.

Here are some other ideas for presentation. This one is a beautifully retro habitat for a well organised, First class snail collection:

This collector's notebook explicitly shows her thought processes, in using a key to identify specimens. This would be a good thing to emulate. Note the nice labelled sketches.

Also earning a first, here's only half of a student's beautifully presented collection of marine molluscs:

and some pages from her interesting and attractive notebook.

You won't go wrong with some similarly thoughtful commentary, pictures and maps, and annotated illustrations of your own. Note that this sort of thing is best created as you go along, while it's all fresh in your head. Preferably, you'd always take your notebook into the field too, just to catch important and easily forgotten thoughts provoked by wandering somewhere new and finding something interesting. One day, doubtless we will all be creating multimedia electronic notebooks with videos and animated diagrams. But in the meantime try to bear with the paper version required. (At least paper notebooks will never have hardware / software problems a decade or ten down the line: scientists are finding useful information in 100 year old field notebooks using their eyeballs, but how many people are digging information off 20 year old floppy discs?)

This collection of seaweeds was given a very good mark, but my photos of it were awful. So I'd like to show you an idea of how it used a very professional-looking way of collecting together the large number of specimens (which as you see above were beautifully preserved on separate sheets of good quality paper, with what appeared to be typed labels -or maybe it was just a retro font that looked like typing, nice anyway). They were held in a 'drop front herbarium box' like this:

from Preservation Equipment Ltd though I'm sure other options exist

So that's an idea for anyone doing seaweeds, or ferns, or Asteraceae flowers - anything where you have lots of flat sheets. It might even work for winter trees. The drop front makes it easy to get the sheets out without damaging them (and it looks better than a lever arch file, you must agree).

For more inspiration, see the other posts I've written about 'how previous students got good marks'.

For a bit of advice on how to choose what to collect, you might want to read my various thoughts on the matter, and the general encouragement here. For more information on notebooks and what to put in them, try the link in the list on the top right. --->