I am the SEEDS mentor for Marla Striped Face-Collins of Sitting Bull College, who is a 2006-2007 SEEDS Fellow. We had great fun at the SEEDS Fellowship Professional Development Leadership Workshop held last March, which was my first exposure to the SEEDS Program. I was really impressed by the knowledge and enthusiasm of all the SEEDS students.
SEEDS is a great way to expose students to ecology through networking with established ecologists and student peers.
I am helping Marla with her research project on the effects of beavers on water resources in the Northern Plains. I studied beaver ponds in northern Minnesota, but this was my first exposure to beaver dams in the Plains. Beavers are amazingly versatile animals - Marla and I saw a beaver dam constructed almost entirely out of mud and pieces of shale from an adjacent bedrock outcrop. The dams that beavers are building at Marla's study site are different than the big beaver ponds I studied because they just raise the water level in the creek by little stair-steps, like the water in a ship canal. The water that the beaver dams retain is really important in this region, though, because other parts of the creek dry up in summer. The western Dakotas have experienced severe drought for a several years, and it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit when Marla and I did our last field work together. It was very refreshing to go wading in the beaver ponds!
I became interested in ecology because I witnessed secondary succession in my backyard. As a girl, I lived in a suburb that had an old field behind it, and I spent many happy hours observing nature firsthand. I brought home a jar of what I thought were tadpoles, and discovered instead something about the life cycle of mosquitoes! That old field has been replaced by a fitness center now, but it was a wonderful living laboratory when I was growing up.
My advice to today's ecology students is "take a GPS along with you." A Global Positioning System (GPS) is an amazing, inexpensive technology for documenting your field location. Knowing where you did your field studies will help other people use your data, and will help you in the future when you are scratching your head trying to remember the location of your research plots when you go back for a repeat visit.