The application is now available for the Summer 2023 REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources. Read about this year’s projects here and apply here.

This week involved analyzing the data from the UMD farm from the previous week. Vials of surface water in the rice tanks and ‘peeper’ water that was soaked in the plants’ roots were all measured. Weight, pH, and changes in color were all recorded. This was good experience for me to learn laboratory skills in sampling and recording.

At the farm, our team measured plant count in the many wild rice tanks. These are controlled for sulfate by measured sulfate being pumped into the surface water of tanks. Bacteria that typically coexist with wild rice also live in the tanks; they fix the sulfate into sulfide which permeates into the water and is lethal to wild rice.

This week we accompanied researcher Rebekah Brassfield, aiding her with bumble bee work. We observed fly-bys, and flower visitation by bumblebees, as well as noting wind, humidity, temperature, and flower species abundance.

Her field sites are on tribal land, stewarded by Confederated Salish + Kootenai Tribes, filled with beautiful wildflowers and wide views of this valley, about 3,600 ft elevation.
Her sites are located in the trails above Jette – a housing development that moved from tribal homelands, into “owned” allotments, via the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887), followed by the Flathead Allotment Act (1904). This moved tribal land into settler ownership, effectively, “breaking up of communal tribal homelands and setting a course for catastrophic land loss on reservations.”

Meanwhile,
Noah found that his research question regarding evapotransportation rates correlated with wind has essentially been answered already. He deftly pivoted, now working on climate change effects correlated with evapotransportation.

Philip has been developing his R skills, as well as analyzing wind data. His work is moving along smoothly, investigating relationships between wind and lake shore erosion in the [East Side/Finley Point/Finley’s Armpit].

Logan continues his work, analyzing GIS layers, working towards building a habitat suitability model for Yellow-billed Cuckoo. He anticipates going to groundtruth with one of our mentors, this Friday. He is concerned about the complexity of the modeling in his research.

erinbell has been hanging on the edge of her seat, waiting to hear when and where she will be able to gather soil sampling for her project with wetlands and carbon sequestration. She remains excited, and has just found that she will be able to do her first field day this Friday.

Also, we had a bbq and it was sooooooo nice!

Here’s me in a cave

hello

orientation days at glacier international park.
my favorite part of this trip was getting to know all the humans involved. our mentors and my research colleagues all seem to be tremendously interesting and kind-hearted.

Hello, I am Khang and I am excited about this summer’s research!

Yusuf Khairulhuda, a University of Minnesota student majoring in Product Design/User Experience was an IonE Sustainability Intern for the 2021 REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources. Besides his work providing our participants with a great experience this summer, Yusuf created this story map about the REU SLAWR 2021.

REU SLAWR 2021 created by Yusuf Khairulhuda

The application is now available for the Summer 2022 REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources. Read about this year’s projects here and apply here.

All the participants did amazing work! Visit their team pages to see abstracts, posters, and story maps.

For the past two weeks my partner Jackie and I have been doing job shadowing at FDL natural resources dept. We did a variety of activities which included hunting for invasive snails, aquatic vegetation surveys, electro shock fishing, visiting a local abandoned wolf den, and also visiting their manoomin lakes. It is very inspiring how the tribe uses their tribal sovereignty to the fullest extent by creating their own water quality standards, caring for not only their lands but also their treaty territories in the area. We got to hear the stories from many of the FDL staff and why they’re invested in caring for the land. This experienced has peaked both of our interests in working for tribal DNR in the future.

Zanti Rains

My project is on the erosion of the wetlands at Finley Point on Flathead Lake in Montana. It involves Kerr Dam, which is causing the majority of the erosion, and it involves a request by a community member to build a dock right through Finley Point. This summer, I am researching the issues going on at Finley Point all behind my computer.

Being a virtual undergraduate researcher consists of long hours of studying scientific papers and articles and taking organized notes. It also consists of Zoom and learning programs like StoryMaps and GIS Mapping. My mentor, Peter Gillard, is the GIS program manager with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He has been a big help in getting started and finding resources. I’ve learned a ton about my project and programs to tell the story I’m learning, and I’ve had a lot of fun doing so. Although I’ve been enjoying my research, it has been a challenge taking on this project remotely and I’ve had a hard time finding my voice.

Recently, I realized my purpose and I feel back on track. This summer, I will act as a translator from a plethora of scientific research and history to the community. I understand now that in the field of science, community outreach is needed just as much as research itself. If no one knows that wetlands are important and they’re being degraded, how can we expect policymakers and community members to take action? To address this issue, the community needs an accessible, thorough, and inspiring story to learn about what is going on and how they can help. That is my purpose this summer: to tell the story of the environmentally and culturally important wetlands at Finley Point to inform and inspire the community.

The local Montana team members of SPAW (Rebekah Brassfield, Antawnna Berthelote, and myself, Aspen Jaeger) went out for the first time on Wednesday, June 16th. We were planning on going to a lower elevation site to conduct a bee capture but unfortunately had to change plans when a very large tree decided to take a nap on the road. We instead went to another higher elevation site, where we took a quick inventory of what was flowering. It was a little too chilly to do a bee capture or Antawnna’s salinity research so we spent the time walking along the road talking about the REU and research project ideas for myself. The drive there and back was beautiful and I managed to snap this picture on the way back down.

Chris is creating an vacuum chamber for working with oxygen sensitive materials. In reality, he’s holding a Kleenex box. The chamber uses nitrogen to ensure there’s no oxygen in the chamber. Team Stream – manoomin – toured Cara Santelli’s lab in Snyder Hall at the Univ. of Minnesota. Snyder is where Team Stream prepared geo chemistry materials for their first field day on June, 14th 2021.

https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/essays/serviceberry-economy-abundance

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance

The model I am working on is built in python and simulates carbon nanotube networks. Previously, you would run them model, save the data to your computer, and put that data into Mathematica in order to plot the points and get the “m value” from plotting the points in a loglog plot. Recently, I was able to add this plot and m value into the python code itself to save some time and the need to run a second program.

There is a small lake just outside of city limits that I went to a couple weeks ago. I drove around and took some pictures but they are to big to be uploaded onto here. People can fish and go boating on the lake. There are camp grounds near the lake, but I’ve never camped there.

Making hundreds of slides and going numb after inhaling glue for hours paid off! We were able to uncover many plant axes containing glomeromycotan fungi. Most of my work has been doing literature reviews and making comparison tables, and we believe our material represents a new species. Or if anything, a variation of a species already described. Either way, (new species or not) it is still amazing to recover 400 million year old fungal spores that are less than 100 micrometers. More knowledge on fossil fungi-plant interactions further supports the hypothesis that they evolved together.

Yaghali’du, eshlan Cody Henrikson. Hello, my name is Cody Henrikson and I am of Dena’ina and Sugpiaq descent and an enrolled member of the Ninilchik Village Tribe of the Kenai peninsula in the great land of Alaska. I am a senior undergraduate at Humboldt State University double majoring in Marine Biology and Native American Studies with a focus in Indigenous Food Sovereignty. My passions for the ocean, my traditional foods, and tribe have led me to my professional goal of creating and managing marine aquaculture systems in his home state of Alaska. I hope that in doing so I can provide economic growth and stability, a source of food sovereignty, and research opportunities for my people, community, and all of Alaska. Naqantugheduł, the tide is coming in (good things are happening and you cannot stop it)

Jamie Colvin here and ready for this experience. I am so excited to get started this summer with all of the interns and mentors. I absolutely love field work when it comes to conducting research. I believe that is the best part of it all. Pictured is the Haskell Wakarusa Wetlands in Lawrence, KS. I had recently surveyed for important ecological factors that make-up this wetlands at Haskell Indian Nations University for my Aquatic Biology course I enrolled in for the Spring 2020 semester. I was focusing on Typha latifolia or commonly known as Broadleaf cattail. This was just at the beginning of spring, so the cattails were not fully formed just yet as you would normally envision one.

Here’s a video of me (Tyler) and my buddy (Butter) but we just call her kitty. She was trying to help me out while I open the accessory kit for our GoPros and as you can tell in the video I was a little overwhelmed when opening it up! This video was taken with our GoPros.

A few months back, it didn’t cross my mind that I’ll be participating in a virtual REU but here we are making the most of it. The students, mentors and my team STREAM all are amazing and I can’t wait for more learning and deepening our friendships.

First week adventures

Hello Everyone,

I am excited to get to know you all and start making content to share too!

I’m finding out a virtual REU can be pretty fun!

Finished processing the available grids and almost completed my paper. Cool thing is that in the first grid several unmarked graves were found. More will be said on that in my paper and on my poster. Worked on my tiny house some as well. We got the lofts in, the house wrapped, and most of the roof on. Cant wait for the shell to be complete to start working on the inside. This internship is challenging in a way because I have had to learn to balance my family life with what was required of me in my research.

Marica, Trinity, Dr. Ishii and I put together an interactive presentation on stormwater, filtration and turbidity for the Open Street Event. It was so great getting to share our research with the Minneapolis public.

The summer has gone by so fast. As it stands, there is one week til my paper is due and two weeks til I head home. Time really flew by and now I just realised how long its been since I posted. So much for a week by week recap lol, but I thought I’d put up some of my pictures (not that I took that many). I went with some of the project leads on a trip up north. We went to Ely then Boise Forte and then Grand Portage. The drive to Grand Portage was the best part because it was all along the North Shore on Lake Superior. Definitely a dejavu moment because of how similar it felt to drives along the Lake Michigan on the way to Petoskey.

I’m sitting in a cafe downtown right now, still working but getting closer to that ideal word count. This Wednesday we were at the Sandy Lake Memorial where Andrea and I canoed across the lake. We also had a preliminary poster presentation with our pals from Duluth and GLIFWC interns. It was good practice on talking about my project. Anyways, it was just a good time with the other interns and I can definitely say that I will miss the friends I have made this summer. So here’s to the next two weeks with these girls.

The temperature has been slowly creeping up the thermometer making the field days uncomfortable. Luckily for me my project is just a lot of reading and calculations that I can do inside away from the heat. As it so happens my desk at home is in front of the AC making for a very enjoyable work area. It is has been very interesting reading about the cultural importance of huckleberries to the Native American tribes. For the most part huckleberry harvest was a time for seeing friends and family as they travel to their harvest locations. They would pick during the day and celebrate during the evening. It sounds like a wonderful time.

We joked about us all getting a bumble bee tattoo at the beginning of the internship. As I already had plans for a sleeve and the bee just so happened to fit into my design I took a break to visit a friend. My friend opened a tattoo parlor here in Polson over a year ago and is doing some nice work. it was nice catching up and getting started on my sleeve.

Before filtration (left). After filtration and back-flushing (right).

Backflushing is the process that reversal of material to flush any contaminants that have been built up through filtering.