July Spotlight - Summer Interns

Summer Interns Making a Big Impact With Our Stewardship Work
by Ryan Johnson, Outreach Coordinator

This summer, we kicked off our second iteration of the Summer CRBLT Internship with students from the Evergreen College hiring fair to support our conservation efforts by conducting site reviews and monitoring surveys for parcels we hold throughout the basin.

This newly appointed intern team has gotten off to an incredible start, already covering approximately 1,000 acres of conservation land on foot in teams of 2 and 3. Each site is scouted for things like invasive species, native plant species, wildlife activity, erosion, ecological health, and more. Throughout these monitoring adventures, these students (or recently graduated students) gain professional experience using maps and digital resources to create a survey plan, walking sites and identifying flora and fauna, traveling to remote locations, and creating high quality reports. It is our hope that this experience sets them up for their professional development and success in the years to come, while supporting us to get caught up in critical stewardship work.

Fortunately for us, many of the interns we met this year are boasting an incredible set of GIS and mapping skills, allowing them to create extremely high quality reports that pair with data visualizations and graphical analysis of parcels across our entire catalog. MaryAnna Swainston (year 3 GIS Student at Evergreen College) for example, has paired her site monitoring efforts with a credit-based project at Evergreen that incorporates parcel data into powerful charts that can help us prioritize (and maximize) our conservation efforts. MaryAnna will be presenting her findings to our team during this month's board meeting to support our conservation and stewardship goals.

We want to thank all of our internship team this summer for their hard work and contribution to our work to conserve, protect, and restore ecologically significant lands in the Chehalis River Basin.