NSF URoL:EN

During my time as an undergraduate at Gonzaga University, I had the unique privilege of working in Dr. Betsy A. Bancroft's freshwater biology research lab. At the time that I joined, Dr. Bancroft's lab had just become a part of a 5 year long NSF- funded project that partners with Oregon State University and Whitworth University. The project title is URoL:EN- Rules of Resilience: Predicting Transformation of Emergent Freshwater Networks Under Variable Climate Regimes. The goal of this project is to understand how biological communities in freshwater ponds in the Pacific Northwest respond to changing climate conditions so that we may increase our ability to create and implement adequate conservation plans. Through this project and the mentorship of my advisor, I was able to participate in this research in many different ways.

ID work: As part of the project required that we understand how freshwater ponds are being affected by a changing climate on the community level, I spent a significant amount of time sorting through samples that were collected from nearby wetlands to identify and count the different families present in these ponds. This allowed me to gain a skillset of identification for freshwater macroinvertebrates early on in my research career.

Field work: To collect our data for this project, our lab was advised every summer by PhD candidate Courtney Hendrickson from the Garcia lab at Oregon State University. Over the course of roughly 10 days, we sampled from a subset of wetlands in Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge that varied between permanent and temporary ponds. From each pond we would collect traps that were placed the day prior from sections that were randomized. On the day of collection we also took dipnet samples and photographed and released any vertebrates that were caught, while preserving macroinvertebrates to ID later in lab. The purpose of this field work is to understand how freshwater communities may vary between hydroperiod by utilizing various sampling and field techniques.

Summer 2024

Summer 2025