Evan Eifler

Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by nature. This fascination has led me on a number of adventures and has compelled me to pursue botany and ecology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I've been doing field work related to botany for roughly 9 years now and have been employed by the Nature Conservancy, the Chicago Botanic Garden, and UW Madison where I've worked on a broad swath of botany-related research projects. I've worked in sun and rain, swamps and deserts, flat prairies and rugged mountains, and everything in between. My fieldwork has taken me all over Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Southern California, and the Cape of South Africa where my current field research is located. This research is concerned with the ecology and evolution of Geissorhiza (Iridaceae), a Cape endemic genus full of rare and fascinating flowers. I hope that this research will shed light on the evolution of one of our world's great biodiversity hotspots while raising awareness for a poorly understood group of flowers deserving of our attention. This campaign will help me achieve my goals as a graduate student which will in turn help propel me into a career working to protect and preserve our earth's botanical diversity.

August 2017