Ingrid has completed her junior year as an Environmental Studies major whit minors in Geography and Biology. She is interested in the outdoors especially hiking, biking, running, climbing, and camping. Her future plans are to take a year or so abroad in Spain and then go to law school to study environmental law.

Recent research has indicated that starch grains preserved in soils and sediments can provide significant and useful information in landscape archeology and paleoenvrionmental studies. Preserved starch grains provide information on the ancient flora as well as agricultural processes used by former inhabitants of the region. Successful paleobotanical and paleoenvironemntal studies have included The decomposition of starch grains in soils: implications for the archeological residue analysis by Michael Haslam which essentially discusses the varying ability for starch grains to be preserved in different soil conditions. To date, there have not been any published reports of starch grain analyses from sites anywhere within the Mediterranean uplands. The current research is an attempt to fill this void by conducting a starch grain study in the middle Sangro Valley in the Abruzzo, Italy. In consultation with a paleoethnobotanist, a starch grain reference collection is being established of the significant starch-producing flora of the region. Soil samples were collected from a seasonal lake within the archeological rich region of Monte Pallano. A protocol is being established to extract the starch from the sediments. The extracted starch grains are then to be identified by comparing them to the reference collection. It is anticipated that the taxa identification will be to the Genus level. In addition, creating a reference collection of starch grains using modern plant material can provide researchers with useful data to compare with and identify ancient starch grains found in soil samples collected from the research site. Creation of the starch reference collection requires modern plant material to undergo a series of processes including grinding, drying and defloccuation in order to separate out the starch grains. These grains can be recorded and used to compare to the actual findings in the soil samples collected. The soil samples also need to be processed using several acids for deflocculation and heavy liquid flotation. In the Sangro Valley in particular, the starch grains that will be extracted from the soil cores collected from Lago Nero can provide researchers with information about the historical vegetation of Montea Pallano as well as agricultural practices that occurred on or around the area by the ancient Samnites and latter inhabitants.