Kschmoker1
Registered: November 2018 City/Town/Province: Albuquerque Posts: 1
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For my Service Project, I have put in over 100 hours in with the Bosque Ecological Monitoring Program. This organization was introduced to me through another student at my high school. I was interested because of my interests in wildlife biology and the workings of an ecosystem. I started off with helping BEMP leaders to assist students in a monthly activity called Monthly Monitoring. During this time, students from elementary school to Seniors in high school act as citizen scientists to collect data on depth of groundwater, water quality levels, leaf litter bins, and more. This was a great way for me to be introduced to the organization, and it allowed to to sharpen my leadership skills with the kids.
With more experience I began to work at the UNM office sorting the data from the leaf litter bins that were previously mentioned. These are pretty much just bags that are full of the various organic material that has fallen or blown in a tub over the past month. My job is to sort the leaves by species and whether it is a reproductive part or not. The total weight of each species as well as the combined weight are written on a data sheet, then transferred to an online database. The same sort of data collection has been done only with arthopods, of which were classified and collected in a similar manner.
The most exciting moments of this project
would probably be the small mammal trapping, where we would (you guessed it) capture small rodents and tag them for further monitoring. Same would be done with small birds as well. We would also capture fish and turtles in a similar manner but would only write down the weight, species and any additional notes before releasing them back in to the wild. The most memorable of all of these captures was the Mexican Grey Wolf capture. During this time, we went out to a reserve for the wolves, where we would have to create a human wall and scare them into a den, of which we would cover with a crate and place them in to. The young wolves were then shipped to another reserve in California for breeding purposes.
Over all I think this project has opened me up to the world of Biology and the possibility of me pursuing a career down this path. This experience will be good for future resume's and simply having the prior field experience will be beneficial regardless of my career choice.
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