iUTAH Undergraduate iFellows

 

Week 9 Recap

July 11-15, 2016

 

Joydino Beyale

 

 

 

Heather Bottelberghe

The past two weeks have been jam packed with fun and exciting experiences! Tuesday last week I drove to Oregon with Jess Wood, a Watershed Science graduate student and Andrew Hackett (iFellow). We drove up the mountains near La Grande, Oregon and entered the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range. Jess has been collecting data from a river there called Meadow Creek so that she can create a flow model. 

 

We helped Jess with her field work on this trip for about a week. We hiked through the forest and tall grasses and muddy wetlands to reach the river every day, then we measured the flow of the stream, air and water temperature at different points along the stream's path. It was challenging work, but it was great to learn and practice new skills and gain knowledge about water research.

 

This Tuesday we returned from Oregon. The rest of the week I worked on creating a poster for presenting my mosaicking project. On Friday I attended the iUTAH All-Hands Meeting where I met other iUTAH participants and learned a lot about the development of iUTAH EPSCor, the goals and accomplishments of iUTAH EPSCor, and I presented my poster in a poster session. I was grateful to receive both compliments on the progress of my project and helpful insight on how to present my project even better in the future.

 

 

 

 

Katelyn Boyer

With my internship drawing to a close I have been trying to get everything finished. Finishing my poster for the IUTAH Summer Symposium was my main goal for the week. The research I have been working on for this summer is how fires affect snow accumulation in mixed conifer forest. For my poster I decide to focus on how percent conifer mortality relates to snow depth. Using excel I created a scatter plot using the 2015 and 2016 snow data and the percent mortality data. Figure 1 shows that as percent conifer mortality increases snow depth increases. Taking percent conifer mortality and comparing it to burn severity shows that as burn severity increases, percent conifer morality increase (figure 2). From these two graphs we concluded that as the burn severity increase snow depth increases. Whether this transfers to more available water, is unknown. Further research is needed on how snow ablation is affected by burn severity. With more open stands due to higher burn severity we would also expect more solar radiation, greater wind speeds, and higher vapor pressure deficits which tend to increase losses to sublimation and evaporation which may offset higher rates of snow accumulation in areas with higher burn severity.

 

 

 

Todd Brown

This week was a great week for research! A couple of great things happened this week. I was able to run my results I have been receiving through the Watershed Area of Suitable Habitat (WASH) model. After running the WASH model, I was able to see a 34 m3/month difference of available area of suitable habitat.

 

On Wednesday I was able to go with a small research group at Utah State University and travel to Idaho and tour some hydrology buildings and systems. It was a great opportunity to learn more about watershed systems.

 

Lastly, on Friday, we had the opportunity to share what research we have been working on. It was a great opportunity to explain to everyone the research I have been working on in the past couple of months. The feedback I received was very helpful.

 

 

Darcie Christensen

Symposium week! So a lot of this week was dedicated to finishing up, getting feedback, and printing for my poster! It’s awesome to see a set of tangible set of results (though far from perfect) in front of me. We also did some PCR this week with both some success and some interesting results. That’s how research goes though. These next two weeks will be focused on quantifying two more sets of genes as well as getting my paper and presentation done. The symposium today went really well and I got good feedback on my presentation. It was also interesting to see the different aspects of iUtah that I had not know before. Lunch was also delicious!

 

 

 

Georgie Corkery

This week I completed my poster for my project and presented it at the iUTAH symposium. It was a excited to share what I have been learning to new people, and to receive feedback from folks who have experimented with hydroponic systems or greenhouses before. My project is not complete, so my poster did not have a conclusion on it, and that enabled contributions to my hypothesis to be made from the people who visited my poster.  Overall, I felt good about my presentation skills and the aesthetics and content of my poster.

 

Cynthia Elliott

This week was poster poster poster! Friday, we had the cohort session and presented our posters, using powerpoint. We got a lot of feedback and suggestions during that time. On Monday, I began making all of the changes that people had suggested at our meeting on Friday. Taya and Mark helped me a lot when putting the final touches on it. I went to do a trial print on Thursday morning, but I decided that I didn't like it! So I went back to the lab and my roommates helped me make a few last tweaks, and then I got it printed! Luis, Taya, and I practiced presenting for a few hours. I felt pretty prepared for the Symposium. The symposium on Friday was great (and if we're being real, that food was ON POINT!). Presenting the posters was really fun, and surprisingly tiring! I was able to get yet more feedback from people who came by to check my poster out.

 

Andrew Hackett

After getting back from Oregon, I was focused on finishing a poster to display the research I've been working on this summer. I got a chance to present my finished poster and get feedback from the other students at USU's ACWA Lab to prepare for the Symposium poster session. I had never done a poster exhibition before, but I really enjoyed the chance to discuss my project in person!

 

 

 

 

 

Greta Hamilton

This video describes my iUTAH research project on the hourly fluctuations of methylmercury in the Provo River.

 

 

Stacy Henderson

This is a brief video about my iUtah summer research project.  This project mapped selected features of the water policy landscape of Utah for comparison to Utah’s bio-physical water landscape. The map series visually displays the geographic domains of different governmental institutions’ authorities.  This is important because water institutions generally have administrative boundaries that are not necessarily consistent with those of other water institutions. However, these boundary variations reinforce the need to communicate and coordinate through various boundary-spanning activities.

 

 

 

Rebecca Lee

This week we worked really hard in order to finish running qPCR on our samples from the three different watersheds. This allowed us to relatively quantify how much human, ruminant, and dog contamination was in the samples and see how the amounts of contamination differed along an urban gradient. I also finished my poster and was able to present it at the meeting on Friday. I loved being able to talk about my research with different people and receive feedback. It was also interesting to see the research that everyone else has been doing this summer.

 

 

Gabriela Martinez

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Mitchell Steele

This last week I made some final updates to my poster and also looked at different ways to improve the accuracy of the system developed to measure flow. Presented my poster and receive great feed back from different iUtah members on how I can improve my design and work with the pressure transducers better. 

 

Shanae Tate

I successfully made a poster and presented it during the poster session at the iUTAH Symposium!  I am glad that I could have that experience.  I was so nervous, but it ended up not being so scary after all.  I enjoyed conversing with people who have similar interests as I have and who gave me more ideas for the analysis of my data.  I pretty much felt like the queen of the world after making my poster and presenting it because it was something new and challenging.

 

Luis Vidal

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Lily Wetterlin

This week has been very exciting. I finally have my Oxygen isotopic data back from my stem samples. I have started coding the data using the program R. I have some preliminary graphs ready to start interpreting for the following week. Can’t wait to get some results!

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Whalen

In what I would consider the culmination of the iFellows program, I presented my research in front of peers, mentors, and stakeholders this week at the iUTAH annual symposium. It was amazing to finally show off in a tangible format what I’ve been doing this summer. Furthermore, it was quite exciting to see how my other iFellow’s posters turned out. Filled to the brim with colorful pictures and insightful graphs, it was a splendid display of the many disciplines and research focus area’s coming together at once.

 

For the weeks to come, I plan on shifting my attention to the upcoming paper and oral presentation due in roughly two weeks. These two works should serve to further nuance my research, as well as help me grasp in several mediums how to best display the things I have learned in my time as an iFellow. I will say that the meeting itself was bittersweet. While I will continue to follow the iUTAH project and my peers for the future, I know the end of this fantastic summer is near. I may not remember each and every cohort session, but I fail to see how I can forget the fantastic people I have interacted with and the experiences I have been a part of.

 

Sandra Udy (Young)

This week began with another round of DNA extracting at BYU. It has been getting a lot easier and I am always excited to see how the DNA purification process works. I am excited to continue the stable isotope probing process to the next step. This week I also had the opportunity to work on the short scientific film for the project. It was a lot more nerve-racking than I thought it was going to be but I'm excited to have the finished product. I have really enjoyed how this experience has introduced me to many different parts of research that I have never had the opportunity to participate in before. I am really grateful that I had the chance to present my research poster at the end of this past week. I have attended poster sessions before but I've never had a chance to be part of the poster making progress or the presenting process. It was challenging in ways I wasn't expecting and I am very grateful for the opportunity. It required me to have a much deeper understanding about every part of the research I am participating in and is a perfect introduction into what graduate school will be like.