Counting Trees
This show is part of a series exploring Science Moab’s School to Science Program, connecting students with scientists in the field, the lab, and beyond. This program began in 2021 and to date has mentored over 57 local students. In this episode, we talk with mentor Sarah Karinen, botanist and lead technician for the Northern Colorado Plateau Network of the National Park Service, and Maya and Ari Jacobs, juniors at Grand County High School. Sarah has sponsored several day long job shadows with local students facilitated by Science Moab. Maya and Ari spent a day with Sarah in the field at one of the NPS pinyon juniper long term test plots in Island in the Sky. They helped measure trees, learned a lot of different plant names, and talked about ecology out in nature.
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Interview Excerpt - A Day of Science in the Park
Today’s show is part of a series exploring Science Moab’s School to Science Moab, connecting students with scientists in the field, the lab and beyond. This program began in 2021 and to date has mentored over 60 students from Grand County High School in the Student Career and Success Center.
Today we are talking with School to Science mentor, Sarah Karinen, lead biological science technician for the Northern Colorado Plateau Network of the National Park Service, and Grand County High School juniors, Maya and Ari Jacobs. Through School to Science, Sarah has hosted three day long job shadows and one internship with a local student. Maya and Ari shadowed Sarah one day in the field, measuring trees and one of the Park Service’s pinyon juniper test plots.
Science Moab: Why did you want to be a School of Science mentor?
Karinen: This was actually my third spring being a school to science mentor and this past winter I had an internship for a few months, which was also super fun. I love having the students come out, see what I do, get to experience a whole day of working outside, looking at plants and just getting to learn about the place that they live.
Science Moab: Can you give us a rundown of the job shadow you ran for Maya and Ari?
Karinen: Yeah, so they joined us in the spring and that time of year we’re doing monitoring in Canyonlands, so they came out for a day to Island in the Sky, and we went to one of our long term pinyon juniper plots, and they got to measure trees They got to help me collect soil samples, which help us measure and determine how stable the soils are.
We learned a lot of different plant names, talked about ecology a ton, and they got to go somewhere that they haven’t been to that many times.
Science Moab: Maya and Ari, can you tell or talk a bit about what you were doing that day? What measurements you were making and what your favorite part of it was.
Maya: We went out to the plot, and we measured the trees, and how many were still alive in the area, and how big they’d gotten since the last recording. we also did a walk across the plot, where every couple of feet we collected soil samples, which then we took back to our base camp and tested for how quickly they eroded to see how strong the soil is against rain and wind. We also did a walk through and recorded any native and non native plants in the area.
Science Moab: Yeah, and what, does anything pop out in your mind as something that surprised you or you didn’t know before that you learned that day that you thought was pretty neat.
Maya: I knew a lot of it, but the part about monitoring how many trees were in the area of the plot I thought was pretty cool, and I didn’t know that they did that. I thought it was just a vague count of the area, but actually each tree has its own tag and name, number, code that you record, and how far along it is. That was really cool.
Ari: our yard every summer gets overrun with cheatgrass, because there’s so much disturbance from our dogs running around out there. It was really interesting to see that at the plot up in Canyonlands, there was barely any cheatgrass. it was probably because there’s not a whole lot of ground disturbance that isn’t spaced out over a lot of time.
Science Moab: Sarah, you’ve already said it’s not your first mentorship, can you tell us why you think this kind of program is important?
Karinen: I could probably talk about this all day, but some of the best parts are that it helps me connect to the community and learn about what the school system is like and then I think it really just connects the students with the place they live and there’s a lot of really awesome science that’s happening in and around Moab and it lets them see what’s happening where they live.
Science Moab: Maya and Ari, what is your favorite thing about science?
Maya: Probably that science dares to question the unknowns of our world, and in a lot of ways it’s really improved people’s lives, and brought them more together, but it’s also like finding a deeper sense of yourself in questioning that unknown, and I think that’s really cool.
Ari: I think my favorite aspect of science is that I feel like through science we’re able to better connect with the world around us, like the plants and the animals, and understand on a greater scale what life’s like through their eyes and in their lives, which is I think it’s really valuable that we learn that we’re not really the only creatures on this planet and we need to learn to live in harmony to survive.
