Day 4: The Oldest Organisms in the World and a Species in a Bucket

Day 4 was about two famous organisms: the pupfish and the bristlecone. The former is famous because of its scarcity and the latter because of its longevity. I had not heard of either one.[1] Both were incredible.

The pupfish were the highlight of the trip for me. The Owens Valley pupfish were one of the first organisms to be listed as endangered species. They were thought to be extinct when the species was described from a preserved sample in a glass jar. Then a small population was discovered in an Owens Valley spring and they made it on the first ever endangered species list. Early efforts at conservation were difficult and culminated in an event that Edwin Philip Pister describes in his famous and powerful essay: Species in a Bucket.[2]


The story goes like this. Through an unfortunate string of events the pupfish were limited to a single pool and word got back to the managing entity that the pool had almost dried up. This led to an emergency transfer to another pond:

I netted the surviving fish into the buckets, wincing as each dead one forcefully demonstrated the fragility of life. I then relocated the cages and returned to the buckets, trusting that the battery-powered aerators had not failed during my brief absence. Although the passage of time has obscured my exact words and thoughts as I lugged two heavy buckets and their precious cargo (each weighing more than thirty pounds) over the treacherous marsh terrain, I remember mumbling something like: "Please don't let me stumble. If I drop these buckets we won't have another chance!" I distinctly remember being scared to death. I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species. If I had tripped over a piece of barbed wire or stepped into a rodent burrow, the Owens pupfish would now be extinct!

But for me, the guy in charge of the project was as interesting as the project itself. He reflected several characteristics that I value professionally. I would describe him as ‘a man of action.’ He brought a wide ranging portfolio of resources to bear on his problem and has leveraged diverse social structures and technologies to help build this teetering population. He had wrestled up multiple funding sources, was supporting PhD’s work on the system but also secured free or labor from prisons and youth volunteer brigades. The work was fundamentally results driven, using a mix of ultra-high tech and ultra-low tech and everything in between. He was not afraid of technology but he was not a technology snob. The project is on the cutting edge of DNA analysis (they are doing remarkable environmental DNA) analysis[3] but he our guide told us the most effective tool he has discovered is ‘the rice knife’[4] . The project is a rare combination of insight and hard labor. And that is what impressed me. So many restoration professionals become either academic technology/math snobs or ‘bring in the bulldozers and f- the science’ pragmatists. The pupfish project was an excellent example of getting something big done by a marriage of action and reflection.


After lunch we started our ascent into the White Mountains. People started buzzing about the afternoon plan – hiking in the bristlecones. I had no idea why this was cool, but apparently, the bristlecones are the oldest organism in the world. They regularly get to be 3,000 years old and have been found as old as 5,000 years old[5], leading one student to exclaim ‘these trees are older than Jesus.’ It seems counter-intuitive that longevity would be an effective strategy for making a living in extremely harsh conditions...but there they are.


There is even a song.



Then we continued on to the Crooked Creek Station White Mountain Research Center, elevation 10,200 feet, where we would spend the final three nights. ...and lamp.

This post was written while listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel Pandora Station

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[1] It was at this point of the trip when some of the other students started playing a game of ‘trick the engineer,’ where they would describe biological processes to me and I would have to guess if they were actual or imagined.
[2] He starts his essay by describing a journal he kept for most of his professional career. The entry for the day he wrote about was remarkable: "Transplanted Cyprinodon at Fish Slough; purchased alkaline D-cells, $2.00," There is something profound here about how a life well lived in retrospect is the accumulation of many small acts…a few of which turn out to be decidedly not small…but I have not entirely penetrated it.
[3] There was also a really fantastic bit of hydraulic engineering which resulted in this very clever, multipurpose structure.

[4] Acres of cat tails were cut by hand by large crews of volunteers. Another great example of low tech problem solving is that every time invasive fish endanger the pupfish populations, our guide grabs his snorkel and spear gun and takes care of business.
[5] There is a story that I heard several times during this stop about the oldest tree ever found. Apparently a grad student was coring trees to measure their ages. He got his instrument stuck and had to cut down one tree as part of his study, so he cut this tree down to retrieve the instrument. That night, in his hotel, he started to count the rings, and as the number climbed higher and higher, his heart sunk. He had cut down the oldest tree ever found.

Day 3 SNARL and an Introverted Sierra Interlude

Day 3 started with a visit to the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory. This was not only the coolest acronym that I had encountered in a long time (SNARL[1]) but it was one of the most incredible research facilities I have ever visited. I have no idea how I made it through an entire PhD in river mechanics without knowing about this lab. SNARL is at the foot of the East Sierra, down gradient from Convict Lake.[2] The facility is built on 4 distributaries from the lake and has the hydraulic infrastructure to control the flow conditions in each stream. Additionally, the site has 10 meandering concrete flumes. My head was spinning with the research possibilities.[3] There was one researcher there working with the ‘green world’ hypothesis[4].

SNARL from space.

Before we left, the TA’s reenacted the news caster rumble scene from Anchor Man, for no discernable reason other than our general enjoyment. By those criteria, it was an unqualified success.


Then we proceeded into the Sierra for a lecture on Sierra plant communities and a hike. The lecture was presumably on the plant communities of the east Sierra, but focused on Fire Ecology and eventually zeroed in on the issue of environmental baselines. This is the highly contentious and totally puzzling issue that confronts conservation and restoration researchers of “what is natural.” How far back do you go? We often talk about pre-European state, but are learning more and more that indigenous peoples (and even paeleo-peoples[5]) had substantial ecological impacts.[6] I am pretty familiar with this debate, but found two parts of this one new:

1. Chasing the Baseline: This is the idea that each generation remembers the ‘natural’ state of their childhood and wants to restore it to that, which for each generation, is more and more degraded. So ‘the bar’ keeps falling.

2. Eco-Nazis – Now I have heard this term before as a general pejorative against environmental consciousness in a sort of low brow ad hominem ‘lets associate someone with the worst social movement of all time’ sort of way (think, feminazi, grammar Nazi or soup nazi – essentially a shorthand of http://xkcd.com/261/ Goodwin’s Law). But when we were talking about invasive species that have become locally popular (e.g. mule deer in Pt Reys or Percoforms in Western Rivers) there is a more targeted use of the word, “someone who fights for the purity of native races.”

After the lecture, we were free to hike for the afternoon. Most make the hike up to Ruby Lake. I had been sick for two weeks and was feeling like a shorter hike and a little solitude. I have always felt that the demarcation between introvert and extrovert was a little difficult to negotiate, and have never been able to decide which I am. I really enjoy people. I find them incredibly interesting. I am one of those people who generally enjoys listening to the person sitting next to me on an airplane. Most random individuals have a story worth telling and, therefore, worth hearing. But this was especially true of the people on this trip. It seems like every casual conversation went somewhere unexpected. One person had spent six months traveling around South America, another had just returned from studying cheetahs, another had spent several months isolated in a Costa Rican national park, another had been in the Air Force, another was a Red Sox fan. The people on this trip may have been the most consistently interesting collection of people I have been around. But, I am generally recharged by being alone, which is the definition of an introvert.[7] I think that makes me an introvert who really likes people but that seems absurd.


Anyway, all that is to say, that I took an early left and found a lake and a view (picture above) that I got all to myself. I spent a fantastic three hours reading, napping and praying.[8] One other fun note: I was in the ‘Burning Van’ on day 3, which means I got to select a costume. I selected these flowing ‘pants’ that were really more like a skirt. I selected them because they had lizards on them (below) and were mildly ridiculous (which seemed to be the general point, and I was committed to embracing the van themes). But what I did not foresee was how exceptionally practical they would be for the day’s activities. They were light and loose enough to not restrict while hiking, but they were open enough to stay cool, while they kept the sun off. Lizard skirt-pants FTW.


On the way out we stopped for pie at a spot called Pie in the Sky.[9] They offered a pear-cheddar variety. Now, berry pies and crustaceans are my favorite foods on earth. So I decided that, though I was deeply intrigued, I wasn’t going to risk my opportunity to have a berry pie to be adventurous with a pear-cheddar…until one of the other students offered to split two pieces of pie with me (so we would each end up with one total piece but it would be half experimental and half ). It was a sort of culinary bet hedging, It was brilliant[10], and delicious.

[11]

I don’t have a good place to write about demographics, but it was one of the really interesting things about the trip. So I will put it here. The demographics of the incoming Ecology cohort could not have been more different in every way from any engineering cohort I have been part of. Only one or two of the 28 students was from a country other than the US. Only four or five students[12] had ethic background that was not Caucasian. And only seven of us were men. Being used to a field dominated by dudes from all over the world, this was new. In some ways it was more diverse and in other ways less.[13] The reason I stuck this in here is that we talked about it at dinner on day 3. We all had to write something in our application about how we would add diversity to the community. I shared my response to that question which went something like: “The diversity question is uncomfortable for white men who are totally committed to the value of diversity, but have very little of it to offer.” [14]

I went to bed at 9, which turned out to be pretty typical[15]. This was probably the most regrettable part of the trip for me. Due to my extended sickness, some thyroid adventure, and being the oldest trip participant, I simply could not keep up. But, in my opinion, the key to aging well is to embrace each life stage for what it actually is.[16] Being a 35 year old student whose body is failing in very mild ways is fun enough.

This post was written while listening to the Neutral Milk Hotel station on Pandora[17]

Baxter?

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[1] I evaluate Acronyms on three metrics: 1) cleverness (is it fun), 2) ease (is it easy to say – after all, the objective of an acronym is to make communication more efficient) and 3) Naturalness (does it seem like the name was messed with in order to get a better acronym). SNARL works beautifully on all these criteria. I guess there is a potential 4th criterion: propriety. A woman in my office was planning a release of a new piece of software that she really wanted to name the Prescriptive Modeling System…but got shut down.
[2] Site of a classic, old school, wild west shoot out.
[3] And the potential for robust replicates.
[4] The green world hypothesis (from a paper affectionately known as the HSS or ‘the Etude’) asserts that because the world is green, herbivores must not be resource limited (meaning that predation or disease are the primary limiters). This led to a discussion between a couple of the students in which one of them suggested that the fundamental ecological question that you have to ask about any organism is ‘why doesn’t my organism take over the world?’
[5] There is substantial support for the hypothesis that the extinction of the Holocene mega-fauna (mastodons et al.) was the result of human hunting. On a separate note, I decide during this trip that ‘the Charismatic Mega-Fauna’ would be one of the best band names of all time.
[6] There is evidence that the indigenous inhabitants of the east sierra employed prescribed burns to make the forests easier to hunt in. This means that the historically high fire frequencies that we have always assumed were natural may, themselves, be anthropogenic.
[7] We also have had trouble pegging my wife on this scale. I generally really enjoy people but would almost always choose to spend time alone. Amanda is constantly planning events with large groups of people, but generally enjoys solitude.
[8] And yes, the praying did transition into napping…but it also transitioned the other way.
[9] I have written before that, while this phrase is often used to mock Christian eschatology it fails in two ways. (1) It demonstrates a total misunderstanding of the actual Christian hope of a renewed world and cosmos and (2) I really, really, really like pie. Pie in the sky sounds fantastic. And, this was simply empirical support for that contention. Consider it and excellent ante-type to a type that does not actually exist, but would not be troubling if it did.
[10] Have I mentioned that these people were extremely intelligent. There were times that this was highly advantageous.
[11] For the record, a pear-cheddar pie is a pear pie with a quarter inch of cheddar melted on the top. It is exactly as good as it sounds.
[12] By my very rough estimation.
[13] I also suspect we were less politically diverse than engineering communities I have been part of. And adding me did nothing substantial to broaden this.
[14] One of the women pointed out there is a little irony (in the Alanis Morssette, as it has come to be known, definition of this word) here that by being a dude I actually did augment program diversity.
[15] Here I am using ‘typical’ in a ‘Lagrangian’ sense in that it was typical when you observed me on a temporal scale not in the ‘Eulerian’ sense of, it was typical of all at a given time.
[16] I think the surest way to make yourself miserable is to get stuck in a life stage and not be able to let it go as it lets go of you.
[17] So, we talked music in the Burning Van on day 3 and I took notes. The musical citations for the remaining posts (including this one) will be mostly Pandora explorations from the recommendations of my friends from Van 6 on day 3.

Day 2: The Cold Desert and the World's Most Revolting Protein Shake

Day 2 was largely a travel day as we drove along the Eastern edge of the Sierra from Donner to Bishop. I was in the Anchorvan which was as much fun as it sounds.


The Anchorvan kept a separate walkie talkie[1] which led to a rousing contest of ‘How many terms can you think of for throwing up?” Before long we had diverted from actual phrases and just started making things up. A couple of my favorites included: Technicolor Yawn and Porcelain Opera.[2]

But the day was not just Will Farrell quotes and explosive synonyms. We made one major content stop, at Mono Lake. I had driven by Mono Lake a couple times[3] but had never stopped. We parked a little less than a mile from the lake and walked through the famed ‘cold desert’[4] of the Sierra rain shadow to the Lake.

The objective of the walk was to observe a salinity tolerance gradient in the plant communities. Since LA decided to start taking water from Mono’s tributaries[5], the lake level has dropped, leaving the remaining water more saline and alkaline. This left concentric rings of vegetation where, with the vegetation rings closet to the lake being least diverse and most salt tolerant. But even in the most diverse rings, the vegetation was described as depoperate (with only 52 species, which, we were told, was fewer species than could be found in the average Davis lawn).

The lake is so saline that even at natural lake levels (and salinities) only two animal species are prevalent: the brine fly[6] and the brine shrimp. But what these species lack in diversity, they make up for in biomass. It is estimated that each year these two species account for 6 million tons of secondary production in Mono Lake (4 trillion brine shrimp alone) which makes it a hugely important breeding and feeding site for migratory birds. Apparently, every western migratory bird can be found at Mono Lake. These two little high salinity specialists constitute a startling percentage of the calories required for Western migratory avian activity.

Now, I heard 6 million tons, and thought, ‘that’s a lot’ but I didn’t know quite how much. There are so many brine flies in the lake that the shore is littered with brine fly larvae. On the hike out Professor Richards[7] found a rounded rock and said ‘there is no geologic process in this system that would result in a rock like this here.’ It was a grind stone. I accepted this uncritically, having spent several days with my grandfather on archeological digs in central New York and seeing many similar artifacts. But one of the other students asked the obvious question: “What were they grinding.” I was stunned. Of course they weren’t growing and grinding flour in the cold desert. But our guide had the answer that was as revolting as it was remarkable: brine fly larvae. He said that it was common to dry the brine fly larvae into a powder and then drink it like a protein drink mix.

Now, I know that I was supposed to be an ecologist on this trip, but I couldn’t help switching to geologist a few times as I walked through the dunes of a cold desert for the first time. I study river sediment processes, but am always intrigued by the similarities between river beds and deserts.[8] I saw really interesting armoring patters[9] and was introduced to the idea of biogenic dunes (dune morphology that is affected and stabilized by the plant community).

Finally, on the way out, we stopped at a standard roadside attraction to see the Mono Lake tufas. Tufas formed from volcanic venting of highly mineralized water when lake levels were higher. But more importantly, tufa is in a dead heat with ‘boudinage’ for the title of ‘most fun name for a geologic formation’. Seriously, name me a geologic formation that is more fun than ‘tufa’ or ‘boudinage.’

This post was written while listening to the Jon Forman Station on Pandora
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[1] All the vans had walkie talkies to communicate and organize a substantial caravan…and to occasionally play madlibs. But van 3 and 4 kept a separate channel for content-not-for-general-transmission.
[2] There was one involving Chewbacca as well that escapes me.
[3] En route to backpacking trips in the southern Sierras.
[4] Most of the world’s cold deserts are found in central Asia. The defining feature of a cold desert is that all of the precipitation happens when it is cold, and then sublimates, leading to very little infiltration. In the other deserts of the world, dramatic warm rains are rare and unpredictable, but they occur, which means that the plant communities can count on episodes of infiltration. This also leads to a lot of non-decomposed roots in the system since water does not reach them to start the decay process. One of the things that researchers are looking at is the extent to which this constitutes a carbon sink.
[5] This happened in 1941 and was stopped by a 1994 court ruling which required the city to stop pumping until the lake raised to a target level for ecological functionality. The lake is up 7’ since then with about 9’ left to go.
[6] Diptera Ephedradae – There are two interesting facts about this little extremophile. The first is that it can survive unusual salt contents, and the second is that the adults are covered in thick hairs that allow them to go back into the water and feed on algae without getting stranded on the surface.
[7] Our guide for the day and a man of startlingly broad expertise. He fielded questions on volcanic activity, tectonics, archeology, climatology, aeolian processes, despite, presumably, being a cold desert plan specialist. This is what I mean about Ecology being the last refuge for a generalist.
[8] It is essentially the same process except the fluid is much less dense in the non-aqueous environment.
[9] Dark minerals were concentrated in odd places. Usually dark minerals are heavier and concentrate in the troughs of the dunes, but these dark materials were low density volcanic and seemed to concentrate through ‘brazil nut effects.’

Day 1: Onesies, Thematic Vans, and Lake Tahoe

It is no secret that the great liability of the modern[1] academy is that it requires specialization, usually to the point of irrelevance. To someone whose intellectual role model is Blasé Pascal, this seems like an intellectual death by a thousand boredoms. But I am convinced that if Pascal was alive now, that he would almost certainly be an Ecologist. Ecology is the last great refuge for the generalist.[2] For me, it is a little bit like coming home.

UC Davis has the top Ecology program in the country.[3] But their great strength is also a potential weakness. At UCD, Ecology is not a department, it is a ‘Group,’ a loose coalition of 200 students and 125 faculty come from 24 different departments across campus. The obvious interdisciplinary advantages of this approach are vulnerable to being negated by the forces of fragmentation. To mitigate this impending fragmentation, each new class of incoming graduate students go on a seven day field trip together. The objective of the trip is presumably to introduce students from all over the country to California’s ecology and UC’s amazing field stations. But there seems to be a more powerful scientific benefit…friendship. By forging enduring friendships between students who will scatter to labs across campus, the group ensures continued collaboration between diverse specialties. It is brilliant. And it was a blast.


My Odyssey[4] started with a 6:30 pickup. My wife (who was about to undertake 7 days of unassisted parenting for the sake of my education[5]) looked at me askance as two TA’s dressed in onesies and bomber hats emerged from a decorated van to get my stuff. “You are going to have fun,” she said, not entirely approvingly. When we rendezvoused with the other vans, it became clear that (a) my van was not remotely an aberration and (b) I was, in fact, going to have a lot of fun. The onesies and bomber hats were the official TA uniform[6] and each van was elaborately decorated with its own theme:

Van 1: Country Music/Redneck Culture
-Played country music[7],
-Offered tattoos to the students in their van each day
-Ate slim jims and jerky
-Decorated with empty PBR cans

Van 2[8]: Carnies
-Ate popcorn and peanuts[9]
-Played Carnie trivia
-TA’s dressed as new Carnie ‘freak’ each day

Van 3: Life Aquatic
–The van was decorated as a submarine
-Had a mascot (inflated dolphin)
-If you were in the Life Aquatic van for the day you had to wear an “Intern” shirt
–Played the Life Aquatic movie.
-Theme song “I’m on a boat”.[10]

Van 4: The News 4 Anchorvan
–Played the Will Farrell movie Anchor Man,[11]
-TA’s dressed as the characters
-If you were in the Anchor van for a day you had to wear a tie[12]
-Someone had to hold a lamp, because, well “I love lamp.”

Van 5: The Safari Van
– great Jungle themed sound track
– ‘animal ears’ for students
– TA’s wore pith helmets and very short shorts.

Van 6: The Burning Van
– The TA’s had just returned from “Burning Man” and kind of just kept the party going.
-If you were in the Burning Van you had a huge selection of outlandish costumes to choose from.
-And they had great music.

Tahoe

The cultural curiosities were the big story of the first day, but there was some interesting content as well. We went to the two UC field stations in Tahoe. I had been to one of them before, but it had undergone such a thorough renovation in the last couple years that I did not notice it. Tahoe has three main research issues.

1. Loss of Clarity: In recent history, lake clarity has gone from 100’ to 60’

2. Invasive Species: Lake Trout, Asian clam et al.

3. Climate Change: Tahoe ecology is dependent on winter stratification and summer mixing. This is a classic ‘threshold event’ where small incremental changes in climate could have dramatic, non-linear effects on physical and biological systems.


The most interesting Tahoe trivia of the day: There is enough water in Lake Tahoe to cover California in a foot of water.

I had heard the Tahoe shpeal (um, not sure how to spell that one) before, but it took on a new angle with my new ecologist companions. Many of them seemed to agree that clarity research was overrepresented with respect to its ecological impacts. They kept trying to understand why clarity mattered ecologically[13] and could not seem to get a straight answer other than, it concerns the wealthy land owners and tourist industry and, therefore attracts a lot of research dollars.

This exchange encapsulates precisely what I am hoping to get out of this program. Mostly, I am not studying ecology to acquire a bunch of new facts. I am full. Every new fact supplants an old one. What I find most helpful about entering into a new discipline is learning new ways to think about things. It is like getting a new pair of eyes that see things that were just not there before. I am looking forward to seeing like an ecologist…though you will have to wait until later in the week to find out if I ever learn to dress like one.

This post was written while listening to The Mars Volta Channel on Pandora

Note: Credit for many of these pictures goes to my friend Matt, who knows more about birds than anyone I have met and became my tutor for all things avian.
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[1] Here I am using the word ‘modern’ as a temporal not an ideological signifier.
[2] To the point that some (most notably ‘the Canadian school) have argued that the semantic range of the word is so broad that it fails to signify anything meaningful. By the way, how cool is it to be in a discipline where the cranky contingent is called ‘the Canadian school.’ Ah, Ecology, a discipline so full of wonder and paradox that Canadians are benevolent curmudgeons.
[3] In 2009, it made the #1 spot on the US News and World Report for programs in Ecology and Evolution. In 2010 it was tied for 3rd…but the two schools before it have no Ecology program to speak of and make the list on the strength of their evolutionary biology programs.
[4] This is what the trip was called and (from what I can tell) has been called for the 13 years it has been offered, though, from what I can tell, not a single Homer reference was made during the entire trip…though the trip was not without classical references. There were nearly 5,000 Anchor Man references.
[5] Reason 239,345 why my wife is amazing.
[6] But just the first costume installment. The TA’s each brought a new costume for each day, and a few would undergo more costume changes per day than my 3 year old.
[7] As much as riders could take…which I think amounted to ~3 tracks.
[8] My home van
[9] We were encouraged to shuck peanut shells on the floor of the van once it was confirmed that no one in the group had peanut allergies.
[10] This song gets funnier with more plays. One of the other students got to the heart of it: “It is funny because being on a boat isn’t really that great.” But it plays well as a deconstruction of contemporary hip hop hat has so much talent but nothing to say. I have written about this in my main blog, but I never feel older than when I talk about how rap used to be great.
[11] Apart from Stranger than Fiction, Anchor Man is probably Ferrell’s greatest work, and it is certainly one of the most ridiculously quotable movies in recent history. Bill Simmons once wrote an entire NFL preview by attributing an Anchor Man quote to each team.
[12] Because, “I’m a professional.”
[13] And, certainly it must, since clarity influences light penetration and the thickness of the photosynthetic zone.

Why Ecology?

One of the most common questions I get when people hear that I am undertaking my 4th graduate degree is entirely understandable…why? In fact, my ‘interview’ with my major professor involved just one question. He told me I was going to have to convince him that I was not a crazy person for wanting to start another degree immediately after finishing a seven year Phd.[1] The truth is, I discovered that UCD was the #1 ecology program and offered a non-thesis masters about half way through the PhD and I was so excited about it that the program kind of became the ‘carrot’ to finish the dissertation. But, the truth is, though I find ecology thrilling and would probably want to study it even if there was not professional benefit for me…it coheres remarkably well with my skill set and who I am trying to become vocationally. So, by way of prologue[2] here is an abbreviated version of the statement of purpose I submitted to get into the program.

It has been just over a decade since I started my career as a river scientist. Mostly that work has revolved around geomorphology and numerical modeling of physical river processes. I have acquired an MS and a PhD in these fields and am the sediment transport specialist the U. S. Amy Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) hydrologic center of expertise (Hydrologic Engineering Center - HEC). But I have come to believe that in order to do this work well in the coming decades it will be imperative for me to understand rivers as ecological, in addition to, physical systems.

My position at HEC gives me a unique vantage point on the trends and direction of the sediment transport field and I have come to believe that it is in the midst of a dramatic transition. I have found that the sediment issues my agency and others are trying to understand are increasingly interdisciplinary and, in particular, ecological in nature. Thirty years ago, sediment modelers were employed primarily to compute dredging volumes or determine how long it would take for a reservoir to fill. But the field has undergone something of a renaissance. Over half of the sediment related questions agencies are asking relate directly to the interactions of the physical and biological systems.

With the explosion of interest in river restoration and augmenting the ecological functionality of our nation’s waterways, it has become more important than ever that federal decision makers and quantitative analysts pursue rigorous, multidisciplinary understandings of the complex interactions of the physical and biological processes. USACE engineers in my cohort sometimes nervously joke that we are making careers undoing what previous generations did (restoring channelized rivers and removing dams). My goal is that future generations will not have to spend their careers fixing our misguided attempts at ‘restoration.’

This is my primary purpose for applying to UCD’s Ecology program. I find myself in an era of interdisciplinary decision making and feel the need, as a designated agency expert, to become more interdisciplinary myself. Interdisciplinary teams are imperative, but those teams perform much more effectively when composed of individuals with broad interdisciplinary backgrounds. It is exhilarating to be part of a field undergoing such a paradigmatic upheaval. But I am left feeling that if I am to be a meaningful contributor to this transition, I need to cultivate an ecological expertise on par with the physical sciences education I have acquired.

As an agency funded, non-thesis Master’s student, you will find me to be a highly motivated, low maintenance learner. I will be eager to collaborate with students or professors if my existing skill set proves valuable but should not be substantially burden department resources. Accepting my application would be a strategic way for UCD to infuse[3] a controversial but greening agency with rigorous ecological tools.

When my co-workers have asked why I want to peruse this degree my response has often been, “There is a vast collection of some of the top ecological minds in the world five blocks from our office. It seems irresponsible NOT to utilize that resource.”
______________
[1] It is worth noting, that I worked full time during this degree, making 7 years a pretty good pace.
[2] Or post-script, since, though this will be the first post, it will show up at the end of the blog.
[3] I like to think of myself as a USB port between the academy and the agency.