USGS Week 1

The first week of the NFWF Applied Scholar's program has been short, but a great learning experience. The first day was orientation of course where learned the ins and outs of what was doing and what we were supposed to be doing throughout this program. Day two is when we finally met our mentor's and started working. My mentor is Dr. Sarai Piazza who works for the United States Geological Survey (USGS). More specially she works with Coastwide Reference Monitoring System (CRSM) sites. There are hundreds of sites and USGS is responsible for only a subset of them, around two hundred. Their job ultimately is to monitor the water quality to control the habitat of wetlands. Dr. Piazza explained to me some of the policy associated with their work. USGS provides the science to other agencies that come together and make decisions based on the results of the data collected by USGS. It will be interesting to work on projects this summer and know what  I am doing is doing used to make decisions across the country. I traveled to Lafayette with the USGS team to their headquarters. There I got to meet other members of USGS and see more of the main operation of the agency. This is where I learned about what I would be doing in my lab the rest of the week. The next day I go into and am given an office which was weird because I've never had my own office. Me and another member of the USGS team Rachel went to the vegetation lab in order to get samples from CRSM sites. The rest of the week I worked with multiple samples from different CRSM sites and plots. I would take the vegetation samples from these sites and clip them, separating live green from live yellow and live brown; placing them in bags. There were three different change of species I learned about: S. alternifloura, S. patens, and D. spic. It was great learning these wetland species names as I know they are so important to Louisiana wetland ecology. That's what I did for the majority of my week, the week after next I am going in the field for a few days to actually collect samples like the ones I am processing for data now. Below I have an image of S. alternifloura and S. patens.