My second month at the Surprise Field Office has been busy. Fellow CLM intern Amy and I have been working hard to meet our goal of 16 collections. We’ve got 10 so far, and are currently working on 2 species of grasses. The main challenge has been finding riparian areas with sufficient populations to collect. It’s also been raining here on and off for the past 2 weeks, so a lot of our riparian areas are totally flooded. The rain is definitely a good thing, but we’re not able to collect anything when it’s so wet.

The rest of the time I’ve been working on an Environmental Assessment of a juniper reduction project we’re proposing. It’s still in its early stages, so writing it is a fairly dull task, but we’re grinding along. Learning how to write NEPA documents is something I’m really glad to be learning. I’m not sure where else I would be able to get this experience without any prior knowledge of the NEPA process. I’ve been taking some time to do online GIS courses through ESRI as well. I had almost no GIS experience coming into CLM but I now feel comfortable navigating the program and using its basic functions. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to integrate my new GIS knowledge into my NEPA report.

Here’s to another month of new experiences.

Matt Phillips
BLM Surprise Field Office