Some of my REU background

Hi again cyberfans!

Field research is a little slow right now, kinda like the calm before the storm. So far it looks like my team will be doing some data collection and ground-truthing after the snow flies. So until then, I'm going to talk a little bit about my past REU experiences. The REU program has been very influential in keeping me interested in continuing my college career as well as helping to fund it. For the last two years, come spring time, I've considered junping ship from college back to the job market. However, I've been enticed back by the opportunity to do some of the coolest research around while getting funding to offset my increasing debt. For my first REU course, I wasn't so lucky, I had to pay for it rather than getting paid for it. In the summer of 2005, I enrolled in a forest ecology field research course with Dr. Dan Underwood. It was originally supposed to be on the Elwha but was changed at the last minute due to logistics. I was a little upset over the change at the time but in retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing. Since then I've gotten to do a lot of research an field work relating to the Elwha and its dam removal project. Because of the change that summer, I got to do research and data collection in a few of the Jerry Franklin designed adaptive management forestry areas. Some of you may be familiar with the adaptive management areas from following the spotted owl issue in the 1990's. The result of the spotted owl controvery was the creation of the Northwest Forest Initiative which halted commercial logging on federal land in the Northwest in order to provide habitat for the spotted owl. The adaptive management areas are experimental efforts to create old growth conditions in previously logged areas as quickly and efficiently as possible. Some of the data collection procedures we undertook were soil sampling for nitrate, respiration , and DNA analysis, vegetation trasects, along with tree cores, DBH, and height. The study was intended to monitor the effects of the forestry practices in the different stands on the vegetation and soil microbiology. Anyhow, my experiences with that first study led me to the Natural Resource Management program at Peninsula College and eventually to the Huxley Bachelor of Environmental Science program. Tune in next blog to see what my next research steps were.