It's a lovely rainy day in Davis -- coming on the heels of the cool, sunny, and clear one that followed Tuesday's atmospheric river. The local tree frogs are starting to perk up as the days lengthen.

Meanwhile, several EERREC alumni sent updates. 

Philip Duchild (2023 cohort): I'm doing a year-long internship at Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio through the Scientists in Parks (SIP) program with Conservation Legacy. I'm working with the NPS Midwest Region Inventory & Monitoring staff to monitor and assess wetland health in the park. This entails monitoring hydrology, conducting intensive plant surveys, monitoring amphibians, assessing breeding bird presence, and producing scicomm pieces about findings. I'm particularly stoked about a bioacoustics computational analysis pipeline I'm piloting. Essentially, it uses R to pair a birdcall ID model from Cornell with a streamlined human verification process, with the goal of detecting cryptic wetland birds that are often missed when conventional point count survey methods are used. 

Bridget Patterson (2022 cohort): Bridget graduated from Bangor University [note: that's in Wales, UK, not Maine, US -- Editor] with an MSc in Marine Biology, funded by a Fulbright grant. Their dissertation investigated the correlation between seagrass community functioning and carbon storage. They're now working as a research assistant at Project Seagrass, a conservation charity based in South Wales that supports the recognition, recovery, and resilience of seagrasses globally. 

Trina Miller (2021 cohort): Trina remains on the staff of Algalita, an NGO that works to educate the public about plastic pollution.

Kenny Damper (2023 cohort): I am currently in my second semester of my Wildlife Ecology Masters program at UW-Madison, preparing for my field season in Northern California. While out there, I will be working on my two thesis chapters, the first one seeing how invasive Barred Owls are affecting the little owls native to Mendocino County, and the second one seeing how affective real-time satellite based audio units are in removing Barred Owls from a landscape in the Six Rivers National Forest!