Greetings!

Now that our Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation (ESR) plan has been submitted, we’ve moved right along and started writing an Environmental Analysis (EA) for the Buzzard Complex fires!

My main duties, as per usual, are building models to run reports and then making the maps for the Saddle Draw Fire portion of the plan.

One main skill I have gotten from this internship has been becoming comfortable in Model Builder. I had used it a few times in the past, but never on a regular basis. When you are running the same processes over and over again, it saves so much time if you can just go into the model, make a few changes, and run it again. Also, if someone wants to figure out how you came up with certain numbers, they can look at your models and understand what you did.

Beautiful Model

In addition to making these final products, I’ve also cleaned up the file structure which is pretty complex.  Hopefully every folder now is named so that an outsider can figure out what it contains, and if not, I also went through and created a document that has a short description of the contents of each folder in the Buzzard Complex ESR folder (It’s about 3 pages long…).

I see many of you are wrapping up your internships and I wish you all the best of luck!!!  I’m still around through December and I’m excited to see what fall is like out here in the high desert!!!