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!