Conservation Training
Botany for Naturalists, Ecologists, and Herbalists
May 31, 2024 – June 2, 2024
Location: Grand Marais, MN
Take your botanical chops to the next level with plant taxonomic skills—the foundation of any plant-based practice. A weekend intensive designed to provide natural resource professionals, master naturalists, and herbalists with a solid basis in botanical science. Through the course, you will learn terms for key plant structures, characteristics of common plant families, and how to use dichotomous keys. We will spend the mornings in a lecture-lab setting, then head out on field trips to forests and wetlands in the Grand Marais area to observe and study plant structures in a natural setting. This course is geared towards students interested in learning technical botanical terms, plant taxonomy, and using botanical keys. A knowledge of local flora, experience identifying plants with image-based field guides, or similar experience will be an asset as the course is intensive. Students should have the ability to sit in a classroom setting for 2-4 hours (with breaks) and walk several hundred feet or more into a forest, bog, or other settings off-trail and over uneven terrain.