[00:00:00] Walter: The hearts of gold podcast is brought to you by the grow and share network produced by off the Walter media productions.
[00:00:13] Sheryl: Welcome to hearts of gold today. We have Ella with us. Hi ella.
[00:00:18] Ellla Anne: Hi.
[00:00:19] Sheryl: Can you tell us about your girl scout gold award project?
[00:00:22] Ellla Anne: My project centered around saguaro cacti in Metro, Phoenix, where I’m from. I wanted to raise awareness about a phenomena of saguaros dying prematurely in my community because it was something I had noticed and it was something I didn’t feel was being talked about.
[00:00:43] And I wanted to learn more about why this hap, was happening and then inform my community about this wave of death of saguaros. I reached out to a bunch of scientists in our community, like at the saguaro national park, down in Tucson, the desert botanical garden, the boys Thompson Arboretum, just looking for someone who had maybe also noticed
[00:01:06] this and see what they could tell me about it. My impetus for this project was I had a saguaro in my front yard and we loved it. We would take pictures in front of it for like back to school. It was like the perfect photo op we loved it one day. It like randomly just fell over and it had it wasn’t very old.
[00:01:25] It didn’t have any arms. And it just kind of looked like, like the roots had given away. And my dad was like, yeah, I, you know, I, he like works with ho like like landscape and housing and he’s like, yeah, I’ve noticed this a lot they’re just like fallen over all the time and taking from this. I was so sad about my saguaro
[00:01:45] I was like, I need to know more about this idea. So I would, I reached out to a bunch of different organizations trying to find some saguaro experts and thankfully a bunch reached out back to me botanists from all over Heather own takes. Phenomena. A lot of them are like, this is something pretty new.
[00:02:07] We don’t really know what’s going on, why it’s happening. We don’t really have an accurate count of how many saguaro this is affected because when they’re planted in more like the common area, you know, it’s not really kept track of, they do have tags, no Soros have little tags on them. It tells ’em like where they came from in their like basically like a serial number.
[00:02:28] A plant, but the ones that are in people’s private front yards and backyards, it’s a lot harder to keep track of like, what’s going on. A lot of theories were presented to me, which I then would write about later were things like global warming and just how it, it’s so hot in Arizona already.
[00:02:46] So when you add in certain accentuating circumstances, like Phoenix being a really large metropolitan city, lots of concrete and pavement and you know, asphalt, it creates a heat island of trapping the heat in. So even at night, the heat never dissipates. And that could be a lot for a plant that has evolved to live in a desert, but in a desert where at night it gets a little cooler than it does.
[00:03:11] Phoenix now, there was also some people I talked to at the national park who suggested that maybe some of the issues were in how people take care of their life, privately owned saguaro because When saguaro grows in the desert, it kind of has all needs. It has, you know, the intermediate rain and the sun, but when it’s in someone’s front yard, it maybe is getting watered too much from like a sprinkler or just like seeping water.
[00:03:38] One of the. Possibilities they presented to me was that sometimes a saguaro or a cactus is underneath like a roof and the water will drain onto the saguaro like too much where its roots will start to rot and then it falls over because it’s just like too top heavy. I decided that I should talk about how to take care of a saguaro if you own a saguaro and how best to let it, you know, thrive in surviving your yard.
[00:04:03] I. Reached out through the botanical garden and was put in contact with Jenny Davis and she became later my project advisor as I’m sure, you know, girl Scouts requires you have a project advisor and like a mentor on your gold award. And so she became my project. A mentor because she was helping me with my project.
[00:04:26] Like personally, she knew about saguaros and my project advisor was Carissa deciso who was from the girl Scouts and worked with me on putting together my presentation. And so Jenny works with eco flora, which is a community science project at the botanical garden. And they do a lot of like finding events and projects that basically creates community of citizen scientists.
[00:04:55] Maybe we’re not like real scientists, we don’t have degrees, but we can help collect data that scientists can use to. Create hypothesises, solutions to these problems. So I really like that aspect because before I talk to Jenny I thought my project would just mainly be education of the public. But since, as I was finding there, wasn’t a ton of information out there about this phenomena that I was observing.
[00:05:24] I thought, well, maybe I could find a way to create citizen scientists in my own community using my gold award project. So it’s doing more than just informing it’s creating data that scientists can use to help. Come up with more solutions and ideas for saguaro in metropolitan Phoenix, we would brainstorm through eco flora because they had done this sort of thing before with like organizing the community.
[00:05:48] I created a brochure to spread the word about saguaro premature deaths, the various theories, how to take care of your so, and then we created a website, save our saguarosaz.com. I linked it with you and. We put in more information, more pictures about this phenomenon, but then we decided to use this platform it’s called iNaturalist.
[00:06:13] And it was created, I believe at the university of San Diego. And it’s a website and like an app that you can use to be a citizen scientist. If you see like an animal species or a plant species, you take a picture and you like log where you saw this species. And I thought this would be a really cool way.
[00:06:33] To be able to log saguaros in your community because now then we could start getting like a, a census, an accurate count of how many saguaros we’d have. And plus with these photos and these descriptions if you saw a saguaro and you’d find, oh, it doesn’t look, you know, just like observing it doesn’t look really good.
[00:06:51] It kind of looks like it’s about to fall over. It’s leaning. It’s the weird color you could, you know, take a picture, add that in the description. And then if someday someone came back and it was gone, You would be able to say, oh, okay, well, this is what happened. This was the timeline. It was here. It died, it fell over, just create to create this data that scientists could then use to be like, okay, this is how many saguaros are in Phoenix.
[00:07:15] This is what the symptoms of this. You know, is it a disease? Is it just global warming? All these symptoms they could look at and see what was going on? So use this platform, we set up a little project it’s linked on my website and then the brochure you can use the app or the website. You just make an account and you can just start logging, whatever species you see, especially Soros to help get an accurate count of what’s going on.
[00:07:40] So that was my gold award, proper. But then Jenny helped put me in touch with the a graduate student from ASU named Ryan Esh and his project, or, you know, grad dissertation, grad advisor, Tanya Hernandez, who also works at the desert botanical garden. And they were interested in what I was doing because they wanted to do a saguaros census to learn about genetic diseases and.
[00:08:09] Like a genetic bottleneck in Arizona saguaros specifically in Phoenix, they wanted to they wanna take genetic samples from saguaro in metropolitan, Phoenix, and find out how they’re related if you know, some sort of diseases that they all share, because. That’s not really known in Phoenix is the saguaros that are planted in the valley.
[00:08:32] If they all came from like a farm, if they were transplanted from like the rest of the desert and moved here, if they just grew here, there’s a lot of debate. One person I talked to when I was doing my research, told me that most of the time, the saguaros in Phoenix aren’t natural and that they come from somewhere else.
[00:08:48] So by doing this project, they wanted to know if they could track. Because if some disease, you know, spread throughout metropolitan Phoenix, if it would affect all these saguaros equally, because they were all very similar like related and also it would help us learn more about like there could be a genetic bottleneck if there was too much of the same species, the same exact, like.
[00:09:11] They were all related, if it would like affect the population. So they wanted to use my iNaturalist program to look at how like the saguaros that would have been logged by people and then be able to create a way to enlist. You know, citizen scientists to go out and take more genetic to take genetic samples themselves of these saguaros and then send them back so they could be research.
[00:09:35] So it’s really cool to be working with them. Their project has isn’t over yet. You know, I wanted to have these scientists use my project and I, and they have now ki you know, it’s really exciting and I’m really grateful that they saw my project, that Jenny helped them find it. And that we’re kind of working together.
[00:09:54] To like turn the data that I wanted to collect into, like reality with answers and yeah, it’s really cool.
[00:10:01] Sheryl: How does that make you feel to know that your gold award project was recognized in that way and that somebody else wants to continue it in an even more involved way?
[00:10:12] Ellla Anne: It’s really cool. I was really excited to do my gold award.
[00:10:16] I wanted to do it a really long time, but I was worried that it would be that it wouldn’t have as great an effect as I would want it to be. And so. When I finished my project, I was like, you know, I’m done, but it’s, you know, I was kind of like, well, you know, I’ve started this idea, but I’m not at the point.
[00:10:36] Like, you know, with my degree that I could ever really do anything. I felt like personally with this data, other than share it with my community and inform, you know, help people make better choices about their saguaros but then to almost immediately, after I had submitted my report to the girl Scouts, Jenny was like, oh, these people, they wanna meet with you.
[00:10:59] They really liked your project. And they think it would be like, fit really great with their research that they’re doing it like a university. And I was like, this is perfect. It’s like all coming together. It’s like, it was really cool.
[00:11:11] Sheryl: It’s taking sustainability way to the next level.
[00:11:15] Ellla Anne: yes.
[00:11:15] Sheryl: Your website. I really encourage people to go look at your website.
[00:11:18] Your website is so cool. And that iNaturalist piece that you connected with on your website. It’s so cool to see people’s individuals’ cacti and what their stories are. Have you seen a couple of stories on there that really caught your interest? Or somebody said something really interesting that you’d like to share?
[00:11:39] Ellla Anne: Part of the reason I really like iNaturalist is because when we were talking about our, the census they wanted to do, and the research I was looking at, it would be hard to find a way to, you know, like a privately owned. Land saguaro can’t really just walk on there and like take samples. So in this way, I feel like we’re really encouraging people.
[00:11:58] And there was definitely a couple stories about people who had a saguaro in their own yard and they wanted to include it, even though to them, it was kind of like not a novelty. It was something they saw every day and it wasn’t really like, oh, it’s a new species. I. Know, record this for the community, but it was just a way to connect everything together and make sure that we’re counting all these saguaros not just the ones that are like publicly owned.
[00:12:22] Sheryl: You mentioned quite a few people that were on your team already with all of the website design and all of those other pieces that were there. Who else helps you with your project?
[00:12:33] Ellla Anne: Jenny, of course, was my advisor. And. She was great. And I had a lot of help from people that I interviewed at the botanical gardens Arboretum in the saguaro national park.
[00:12:50] I also worked with Tanya Hernandez at the garden. She helped me with putting me in contact with other people. And then if the girl scout council. They were all very encouraging because when I had submitted my proposal, I didn’t tell them that. Alright. I was, I couldn’t put in there that I knew I was gonna get picked up by like graduate students because it hadn’t happened yet.
[00:13:10] So when I told ’em at the meeting, they were all very excited and very encouraging. It would send me nice emails, encouraging me to Inform them about what was going on. Even though I was technically finished with my project.
[00:13:21] Sheryl: How did you connect with media in order to promote your website so people knew it was there?
[00:13:28] Ellla Anne: Eco flora has a newsletter system and they put my project in their newsletter and it’s featured. It was sent out through their newsletter featured on the botanical gardens. So that was how we got it out there, which is really cool. And I have my article after I did my gold award, they put you in the like local newspaper.
[00:13:49] So hopefully people saw that and started posting their photos.
[00:13:53] Sheryl: What was a challenge you had during your project and how did you overcome it?
[00:13:57] Ellla Anne: Getting started finding the right idea. Like I said, I’ve been wanting to do this, like for, since I’ve been girl Scouts and girl Scouts, since I was a brownie and it’s been a really long time and I’ve been thinking about it and I would go To like workshops and it seemed like everybody else had such like great ideas.
[00:14:15] And I never had anything that I thought this is like really gonna work. It was always, you know, kind of loose ideas, never really something I felt passionate about. And I was really nervous that I was gonna age out of girl Scouts before I could think of something that I really, really wanted to do. And I was so grateful that like a summer two summers before I would’ve graduated.
[00:14:36] My saguaro fell over and I was like, this is something that I can use. This is like something that I felt personally passionate about and something that I felt like was pretty topical for Arizona and Phoenix in general. So, yeah, just getting started, just finding the right idea.
[00:14:53] Sheryl: As you went through the gold award process, what did you learn about the process itself that you didn’t know that might be helpful for other girls?
[00:15:01] Ellla Anne: Learning to use, like the go gold website to log everything was a little bit different than I expected.
[00:15:08] I had to be very vigilant about, you know, how many hours I was doing something to make sure that like all my time counted and that I had. Hours put into my project. So it was very important and I feel like any girl who wants to do their gold gold award should know how important it is to keep track of everything you do, and then be able to like input it into this website so that everything counts and that you’ll be able to qualify for your award.
[00:15:32] Sheryl: What did you do for your bronze and silver awards?
[00:15:35] Ellla Anne: For my bronze award, we learned about zeroscaping, which is when you have your yard with like no plants, it’s just rocks and like natural, I guess, cactuses for here, but like, It’s a way to reduce water over watering and like water consumption. And it’s pretty good for Arizona since we don’t have that many green plants anyway.
[00:15:56] So we worked with a landscape company and we looked into that. One of our troop leaders was getting their lawn redone. So we. Helped with that designing for my silver, I created a activity coloring book about adopt don’t shop was kind of the theme about pet care and how important it is to know where your Your pets are coming from, and it was targeted like first grade, second grade.
[00:16:22] And I made these books and we dropped ’em off at my local. I think I was in middle school at the time, but my elementary school had an after school care program. And so we would dropped it off at. The afterschool program.
[00:16:33] Sheryl: What other girl scout memories do you have to share?
[00:16:35] Ellla Anne: When we went to SeaWorld, I think I was a brownie.
[00:16:39] Maybe, maybe it was the year above, but that was really fun, really special. You know, we’d work so hard to sell all our cookies to get, to go do something. So it was really fun to spend the night. We all, I also liked when we hosted our first encampment at going to camps for so long that it was really fun, especially when you’re an older girl scout.
[00:16:58] I feel like it’s really fun to be able to lead the other little girl Scouts. And so it was really fun to have our own encampment.
[00:17:05] Sheryl: Right now, as we speak, you are actually in France. Why are you in France and what are you doing?
[00:17:12] Ellla Anne: I am studying abroad for four weeks in a town called tour. It’s about an hour from Paris.
[00:17:18] It’s in like the Laar river valley. They have an Institute of a language Institute here. So I’m with some kids from my university and there’s like, there’s like two programs. I’m in the four week program. We came down, we go to school every day. It’s kind of exhausting we we have like, it’s like short day, long day.
[00:17:39] We have the rest of the day to kind of, you know, explore, talk to people. It’s basically an immersion program. I’m living with a host family. So all the time I’m speaking French, hoping to become better. I’m trying to get a French minor in school, but the eventual dream of being fluent in French.
[00:18:00] Sheryl: And where do you go to school and what are you studying?
[00:18:03] Ellla Anne: I go to Michigan state university. I study currently I’m double majoring, I’m double majoring in astrophysics and arts and humanities. What are you planning on doing in your future? Either a career in academia or working maybe with the government? NASA is always, you know, the big one, but there’s other private companies too.
[00:18:25] And I think the arts and humanities aspect is just personally like, just fun for me, but also I think it’ll get help with my writing skills and speaking skills. That hopefully will propel me in the future careers.
[00:18:40] Sheryl: How was your first winter in Michigan? After being in, living in Arizona?
[00:18:44] Ellla Anne: Very different it was very different.
[00:18:46] It wasn’t quite as bad this year. I was told, but I did have to buy a lot of new jackets. And one day it was like, it was our first big snowstorm school was like class was can was canceled. It was very exciting. And we went and we walked and we bought a sled and we tried to find like biggest hill. It was very small, but we all sled all day, it was really fun.
[00:19:07] So it was fun. But also. Dark and cold .
[00:19:11] Sheryl: Is there anything else you’d like to share with the audience?
[00:19:13] Ellla Anne: For any girl who wants to get their gold award that is totally pla- like feasible. It is something that I think everyone should attempt. And if you really wanna do it, I think it is super in your realm.
[00:19:25] Even if you were like me had like no idea what they wanted to do. I just think, keep going to those gold award workshops, keep talking to people in your community, keep talking to other people. Who’ve had their awards. I think it. Always, always work out.
[00:19:40] Sheryl: How do you make your s’mores?
[00:19:41] Ellla Anne: I use dark chocolate.
[00:19:43] Sheryl: Do they make s’mores in France?
[00:19:46] Ellla Anne: I have not seen s’more here.
[00:19:48] Sheryl: You might need to teach them that.
[00:19:50] Ellla Anne: Oh, I’ll I’ll bring over the culture.
[00:19:53] Sheryl: Well, thanks for joining us today.
[00:19:55] Ellla Anne: Thanks for having me.
[00:19:56] Sheryl: Make sure to click, follow or subscribe. So you always know when new episodes are released and don’t forget to power your passion and conquer your challenges.
[00:20:09] Walter: The hearts of gold podcast is brought to you by the grow and share network produced by off the Walter media productions. Thank you for listening and spreading the word on what we do. If you want to share your story of how you earned your goal award, reach out and send an email to growandshare@outlook.com.
[00:20:27] Be sure to listen to the newest episodes on your favorite podcast app, as well as view the full video episodes on youtube.com/SherylMRobinson. That’s youtube.com/sheryl, the letter M, Robinson. Take care, and we’ll see you next time.