The last time I posted here, I had been in town for all of a week, and was just getting settled in. It’s honestly a bit shocking to me that that was only four weeks ago: I\u2019m already feeling very comfortable with the job, even as I\u2019m thrown\/throwing myself into new tasks every few days.<\/p>\n
The focus of my internship is the restoration of a desert oasis and the surrounding area, and the main project from the last four weeks has been planting seedlings to encourage recovery following the removal of invasive tamarisk. Since I arrived we\u2019ve planted nearly 200 individual plants in areas that had been opened up or damaged by the removal process, and though we still have some 80 plants waiting to get in the ground, this phase of my internship is nearly done.<\/p>\n
The other thing filling my work hours has been GIS training,\u00a0something I\u2019ve always wanted to learn both because I\u2019ve always been a little geeky about maps, and because it\u2019ll be a huge help finding work in the future. I\u2019m happy to be able to say that in two weeks ArcGIS has stopped seeming overwhelmingly complicated, and is now merely frustratingly complicated, similar to how I feel about R or MATLAB, or every other computer science tool I\u2019ve worked with.<\/p>\n
Next week I\u2019ll be starting with the two main projects that will occupy my time and energy through August: vegetation surveys, and seed collection for the Seeds of Success project. I\u2019ve already got experience doing both veg surveys and seed collection from university and previous jobs, so I don\u2019t expect much difficulty jumping into these projects either.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve attached some pictures this time. I\u2019ve always been bad at taking pictures, both in that I don\u2019t have much talent for photography and in that I typically forget that I even own a camera. So I\u2019m sorry to say that I don\u2019t have as many pictures as I\u2019d like to. But let me say: the experience of standing on the San Andreas fault line just after dawn and looking out over Dos Palmas oasis as it is both still shrouded in nighttime fog and lit by the sun rising over the mountains? Definitely worth getting up a few minutes early for. Sorry I don\u2019t have a picture of it! You\u2019ll just have to come see it in person.<\/p>\n
habitat restoration in progress<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last time I posted here, I had been in town for all of a week, and was just getting settled in. It’s honestly a bit shocking to me that that was only four weeks ago: I\u2019m already feeling very … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dev-clm-blog.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/IMG_9222.jpg\")
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