Kayanna Turner: Week 2 Recap

This past week we started our extension work with the local high school. We were working with two general biology classes to demonstrate the different things you do and learn as a professional in forestry and natural resources. We decided to teach our two student groups how to identify some common macroinvertebrates in their local creek. We also taught them that an increased variety of macroinvertebrates found in water can be a relatively good indicator of how clean a water system is. The first two days with the students were spent getting to know each other and teaching them about what we’d be doing. The next two days involved collecting data and identifying species, while the last day was spent assisting the students with the creation of a media project to teach others what they learned throughout the week. It was honestly a lot of fun, especially the data collection, because we got to spend their class periods out in the water and the students seemed to really enjoy it.

For our own research project, we spent a lot of time writing and building our water samplers. The research proposals had to be submitted by Friday evening and we had to prepare for our presentations the following Monday. Building the water samplers was pretty entertaining as I’d never imagined having to create and construct something while conducting a research project. They were pretty simple to build, so it only took us about two days to have them mostly finished. The rest of the week we spent gathering supplies and focused on finalizing our proposal. Next week, I’m excited because we’ll be able to start collecting real data with everything we have prepared this week.