For nine weeks this summer five SEFS undergraduate students-Hannah Carbajal, Shelby Felthoven, Mia, Mata, Lark Murphy, and Emily Rabus took part in this year’s Pack Forest Summer crew gaining field training in research and sustainable forest management!
The students worked alongside two SEFS graduate students, as well as forester Chase Beyer. They participated in a wide range of activities, including measuring 90 permanent forest inventory plots from the Continuous Forest Inventory (CFI) project.
The interns joined Beatriz Oliva in several field tasks related to her masters research project at Pack Forest. They also helped maintain several previous research projects led by Professor Greg Ettl including the through-fall exclusion project and assisted with this summer’s timber cruise.
The Pack Forest Summer Crew had an immersive, productive and memorable internship!
For nine weeks, from June 19 to August 18, four SEFS undergraduate students—Nicole Lau, Xin Deng, Brian Chan and Joshua Clark—took part in this year’s Pack Forest Summer Crew!
As part of the internship, these students worked closely with SEFS graduate students Matthew Aghai, Kiwoong Lee and Emilio Vilanova, as well as forester Jeff Kelly. They participated in a diverse set of activities, including a great amount of time measuring 92 permanent forest plots from the Continuous Forest Inventory (CFI) project. During this time, they became true field experts and were able to update a vital piece of information for the sustainable management of Pack Forest.
On a similar note, the interns joined Matthew in several field tasks related to his doctoral research project, both at Pack Forest and the Cedar and Tolt River Watersheds. They also helped in the maintenance of a through-fall exclusion project led by Professor Greg Ettl and Kiwoong Lee, and they were critical in the upkeep of the trail network at Pack Forest and measuring additional small-scale research projects, ranging from regeneration surveys to the installation of other research plots. Finally, during the summer the interns also got to participate in three field trips, including official visits to Rainier Veneer and Silvaseed facilities.
Check out a photo gallery for more on another fantastic summer at Pack Forest!
Photos courtesy of Emilio Vilanova.
Shortly after graduating this spring, new SEFS alumna Olivia Moskowitz flew to Chicago to spend a week training for her Chicago Botanic Garden Conservation and Land Management Internship. Through a highly competitive application process, the program matches interns with federal agencies or nonprofit organizations involved in land management work. For Olivia, that meant heading to Idaho Falls, Idaho, earlier this month to begin a five-month assignment—as a full-time employee, paid by the Chicago Botanic Garden—with the U.S. Forest Service.
Olivia at the 2017 SEFS Graduation.
She’ll be working in four different national forests around the region (Caribou-Targhee, Sawtooth, Bridger-Teton and Uinta-Wasatch-Cache), and covering a big mix of projects, from collecting native seeds (like showy fleabane and horsemint) for sage-grouse habitat restoration, to conducting forest inventories, plant population scouting and GPS mapping. Some of her tasks will be completely new to her. Others will feel incredibly familiar, which isn’t surprising considering the number of lab and field experiences Olivia accumulated during her four years as an undergrad!
Olivia, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, wasted no time getting involved in university life when she arrived on campus. In her first year, in fact, she co-founded a student group, Conservation in Style, and organized a highly successful “Conservation Catwalk” to raise money to support wildlife conservation efforts for endangered species, including African elephants, through The Gabby Wild Foundation.
Though no longer involved with that group, she quickly filled her hours by exploring every opportunity as an Environmental Science and Resource Management (ESRM) major. At the end of her sophomore year in 2015, she headed down to Pack Forest to take part in the Summer Crew, a foundational internship experience that entrenched and expanded her interest in forests and field work. “That’s what started it all,” says Olivia, who also minored in Quantitative Sciences. “[Working on that crew] puts you on the right track, and it’s a whole lot of fun.”
Working in Pack Forest with Stephen Calkins, a fellow intern on the 2015 Summer Crew.
Olivia came back energized in the fall and started working with SEFS doctoral student Matthew Aghai on his dissertation research. She had reached out to Matthew earlier in her sophomore year, and now he was able to bring her in as a lab tech. She started attending weekly lab meetings with Professor Greg Ettl and taking trips down to Pack Forest, the Cedar and Tolt River watersheds, and Cle Elum. She completed the rest of her research at the Center for Urban Horticulture overseeing and collecting data for Matthew’s greenhouse studies. “It was a lot of fun and really intense, but also probably the most valuable experience I’ve gotten,” she says. (Her research there would eventually lead to a sub-study for her capstone project this spring, “The effects of varying light and moisture levels on the growth and survival of 12 Pacific Northwest tree species.”)
Last summer, Olivia then got to work with Professor Charlie Halpern on his long-running Demonstration of Ecosystem Management Options (DEMO) study, looking at how different patterns of harvesting trees have long-term effects on the landscape. That study took her down to the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon, near Crater Lake, and also to parts of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington.
Most recently, this past quarter Olivia worked with Professor Ernesto Alvarado’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory doing a fire-risk assessment report for Washington State Parks out in Spokane. She got to spend several weekends out in the field, as well as plenty of time in the lab working on GIS, writing reports and data entry. “It was great to be a part of something directly useful, and hopefully applied,” she says. She also enjoyed the exposure to how state government works, and getting to meet stakeholders involved in the project at different levels.
Measuring leaf area of destructively sampled seedlings for her capstone project.
Those hands-on research experiences opened doors for Olivia to get some high-level presentation experience, as well. In spring 2016 she presented preliminary results of her capstone research at the 10th IUFRO International Workshop on Uneven-aged Silviculture in Little Rock, Ark., and this May, as part of her Mary Gates Research Scholarship, she gave an oral presentation at the 2017 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. She will also be presenting twice this summer—first in July at the Forest Regeneration In Changing Environments conference in Corvallis, Ore., and then in September at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress in Freiburg, Germany.
Throughout these many side projects, of course, has been a steady stream of memorable classes. “I’ve made it a point to take as many ESRM classes as I can, which has resulted in very packed schedules,” she says. Among her favorites—and there are many, she says—were Professor Emeritus Tom Hinckley’s Spring Comes to the Cascades, and then Professor Jerry Franklin’s ESRM 425 field trip down in Oregon, Fire-Prone Ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest.
Now, at the end of her four years at SEFS, Olivia has some advice and encouragement for other students getting started in the program. “Get involved, and don’t be afraid to put yourself out there,” she says. “It was pretty scary to reach out to Matthew and Greg [Ettl] and know you want to get involved, but not what your role would be. But when you talk to the professors, they’ve been so helpful and encouraging, they take the whole scariness away from the process. I don’t think a lot of students realize that undergraduate research is available to them. I think it set the stage for the rest of my life, and my experience certainly wouldn’t have been as wonderful and fruitful as it’s been.”
On June 19, four SEFS undergrads began a nine-week internship at Pack Forest as part of the long-running Summer Crew. For the rest of summer quarter, these students—Nicole Lau, Xin Deng, Brian Chan and Joshua Clark—will be involved in a set of diverse projects while receiving hands-on field training in sustainable forest management in the 4,300 acres of Pack Forest. Graduate students Kiwoong Lee, Matthew Aghai and Emilio Vilanova, as well as Forester Jeff Kelly and Professor Greg Ettl, will be working with the interns as they develop skills from forest mensuration to species identification, tackling projects from repairing roads and trails to assisting with research installations, and also taking some field trips.
During spring break last week, three SEFS undergrads—Rachael Cumberland, Paul Heffner and Nicole Lau—took part in the annual Spring Planting down at Pack Forest!
For five days, these intrepid students planted a wide variety of seedlings, including Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir, Pacific redcedar, redwood and larch (among others), in different plots around Pack Forest. It was a productive week, says SEFS doctoral student Matthew Aghai, who worked with the students for most of the break. “Who would have thought this year’s crew of three could perform with the strength and speed of 10!”
Seventy-two years ago, a young woman named Ellen Lois Johnson arrived on the University of Washington (UW) campus to begin her undergraduate studies. She didn’t realize it when she applied, but Ellen would be one of the first two women ever enrolled in the College of Forestry—now the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences—and four years later, in 1948, she would become the very first to earn an undergraduate forestry degree from UW.
Ellen attended Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, where she first learned about the College of Forestry. “I had read about [the forestry program],” she said. “They had books on different professions, and forestry sounded like it was very interesting, so that’s what I decided to do.”After she finished school, Ellen ended up marrying and having five children with one of her forestry classmates, Ed Hooven. They eventually settled in Corvallis, Ore., and both worked for many years at Oregon State University—Ed as a professor and forest wildlife ecologist until he passed away in 1978, and Ellen as an assistant to the manager of the College of Forestry’s McDonald-Dunn Research Forest.
Last month, on December 5, 2016, Ellen passed away a couple weeks shy of her 92nd birthday. We were enormously grateful to have had a chance to catch up with her the previous year, and some of her memories of college—nearly 70 years after graduation—were still as poignant as the day she got tossed into Frosh Pond on Garb Day.
Bucking Tradition Ellen grew up in Spokane, Wash., and started school during an era of tremendous change. The country had been at war for several years, and many of her new classmates were World War II soldiers taking advantage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the G.I. Bill. It provided, among other benefits, cash payments for tuition and living expenses for returning veterans. “All those fellows coming back from the service were quite a shock to the professors,” said Ellen. “They were used to having classes full of little high school graduates, but here were these seasoned veterans. In one of my classes, the professor came in and started talking about the weather, and a voice came from the back of the room, ‘Cut out the baloney and start teaching.’ Those veterans wanted to get in there and get going and get on with their lives!”
The professors and students in the College of Forestry were also adjusting to the first two women among their ranks. Ellen had enrolled at the same time as one other female student, but her classmate later transferred to a different school. The next year, though, another young woman, Priscilla Lewis, joined the program, and it took a little while to integrate them fully into the system. Priscilla, for instance, had to lobby to be allowed to participate on a field trip with her male classmates (“Coed Wins Equality; Will Accompany Boys on Trip,” wrote The Daily), and she would later join Ellen as a charter member of a women’s group (“Forestry and Engineering Fems Unite”) that formed to provide support to women in male-dominated fields.
Some challenges of being a female student were less curricular in nature. While studying down at Pack Forest one quarter, Ellen remembers a brazen professor who actually propositioned her, offering her a good grade if she’d spend the night with him. “I was so flabbergasted, so I said the first thing that popped into my head, which was to say that would be too hard.”
That kind of behavior was definitely the anomaly, says Ellen, and she survived the class without further incident—though maybe not without penalty. “I had been getting A’s and B’s, but I got a C out of the course. That was pretty nasty.”
Scraps of History
Throughout her time as an undergrad, Ellen kept a scrapbook and collected scores of handwritten notes, programs, flyers and newspaper clippings from The Daily, including the headlines quoted above. One of her daughters, Louisa Hooven, recently scanned and made digital records of those pages, and the photos and headlines capture powerful scenes from campus life in the mid-1940s—frozen moments that feel as fresh and immediate as the day they were published.
Lois, above, experiences some of the ‘rough’ treatment of Garb Day festivities. Though men showed their stuff by growing a beard that week, the “Coed Beardless,” one article advertised, “will have a chance to show their skill when they take part in the cigarette rolling contest.”
Ellen saved articles that cover everything from news from the war (“Jap Attack on U.S. Not Wanted”) to a humorous campus advice column (“Cleo’s Campus Clinic: for problems of the heart, mind and conscience”); and from school activities (“650 Coeds Pledged in Record Rushing Week”) to social news (“Jeanne Simmons, Navy Man Engaged”). There are scribbled notes, including invites to pledge at several sororities (Ellen accepted at Delta Zeta), and a program for a local production, “Khyber Pass,” a “dramatic operetta” staged by the Associated Students of the University of Washington in cooperation with the School of Music and School of Drama.
Also prominently featured are campus stories about the annual Garb Day festivities and shenanigans, which Ellen and Priscilla experienced firsthand. Back then, the celebration lasted a full week and included several notorious events and traditions, from logger sports and logrolling in Frosh Pond (now Drumheller Foundation), to the culminating dance—known as the “Loggers’ Brawl”—in the Forest Club Room of Anderson Hall. During the week, forestry students were required to grow a beard by the time of the dance or risk getting tossed into Frosh Pond. Ellen, of course, had a rather unfair disadvantage, but that didn’t spare her a dunking. “It was a beard-growing contest,” she said, “and of course I lost that one, so I got thrown into the pond. All in good fun!”
She didn’t go down alone, though. Ellen grabbed onto the wrist of the boy who pushed her in and dragged him right in with her. Priscilla wasn’t quite so lucky when she arrived the next year. The Daily was on hand for her dip into Frosh Pond and recorded the moment—and the annoyance in her expression (captured below)—with a big photo and story, “College of Forestry Girl Student Pays Penalty for No Beard.”
Captured among Ellen’s clippings, as well, is her budding romance with Ed. They met on the first day of class when Ed sat a row in front of her, and soon their names started appearing together in print.
In one short article, “Forestry Club Holds Elections,” the new officers of the Forestry Club—now the Forest Club—are announced, including Ellen as secretary and Ed as treasurer. Then, when Garb Day rolled around, a story noted that the two had teamed up for the double bucking contest. “My husband-to-be was on the other end of a crosscut saw, and the contest was to see who could saw through a log the fastest,” she said. “We didn’t do all that well.”
For the History Books
“That’s been a long time ago,” said Ellen, yet her story is still as vibrant and important as the day she first stepped onto campus. She helped open a door through which thousands of women have since followed, and today more than 50 percent of students at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences are now women.
That’s quite a change—and quite a legacy—for Ellen’s pioneering role in our history.
A few years ago, Helene Fowler inherited the unpublished manuscript of her late uncle’s autobiography, The Book of Daniel. Its author, our alumnus Daniel Gellermann (’39, B.S.), passed away on October 3, 2012, less than a month shy of his 96th birthday. He had transferred to the College of Forestry in 1935 and then went on to a long career in forestry in California from 1940 through the late 1960s—including stints with the Consolidated Timber Company, U.S. Forest Service and Setzer Forest Products—and we were hugely grateful to Helene for sharing the text with us.
Daniel, in a photo dated 1937, two years before he graduated from the University of Washington.
The printed manuscript is dated 1987, and it’s an incredibly detailed, nearly week-by-week account of his life, from as early as he can remember up through school, work, family and retirement. Within that narrative, Daniel dedicates about 20 pages to his time as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, and his writing style opens an intimate and unvarnished window into his thoughts and experiences as a student in the 1930s. We wanted to pull out and share a few lines and memories that especially stood out to us, including the entirety of his great introduction!
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Introduction
“Writing a life story is really a series of hits and misses, inclusions and exclusions, remembereds and forgottens—simply a subjective cross-section of one’s time on this mortal coil. I do have the advantage of being the sole survivor of my generation of Gellermanns, and so I can make it up as I go along. In the process of recall my memory has moved back and forth in time amid parents, siblings, classmates, playmates, church, school, friends, coworkers, jobs, towns, forests, homes, and thoughts and opinions and precepts and attitudes; this is obviously reflected in this account.
It seems to me that for most of us life comprises the early years, a time for education and the pursuit of knowledge; the middle years, a time for occupation and the pursuit of experience; and the retirement years, a time for contemplation and the pursuit of wisdom. I believe we all have our ups and downs and that life balances out for most of us; I have been fortunate in that my down years were my early years and my life’s curve has been on a steady upswing ever since.
Money was always tight for Daniel as a student, so he carried a paper route—first for the Seattle Times, and later a double route for the Post-Intelligencer, that earned him $40 to 50 a month.
My first marriage provided me an education in the liberal arts; my second marriage afforded me an education in the fine arts. I am grateful for both. And I am indeed thankful I could have a handsome and strong and bright son. Life has been good to me.
From here on out my time will be occupied with continued scribbling. I have quotations—some three thousand—to assemble in book form, a book of personal precepts and opinions, and other various essays yet to prepare.
My anagram can provide my epitaph: Deign All Men Learn.”
Time at the College of Forestry
“In the fall of 1935 I transferred to the College of Forestry at the University of Washington and a whole new world seemed to open up to me. The college had a great tradition and there was a comeraderie among the “foresters” that gave us an identity. We were given to understand at the outset that the curriculum was strenuous and that our physical and mental energies would be taxed to the limit; subsequently they were. We were told to take a look at our fellow students both to our left and to our right; the odds were that only one of three of us would be on hand to graduate four years hence. And that is the way it worked out.”
“The Foresters had a blind date dance with the Nurses each year. I could only look with envy at the signup list on the bulletin board since I knew not how to dance and I was too timid to even meet a girl.”
“My two best friends in forestry college were John Connell and Robert Myer … Sad to say, John’s success never quite met his ambitions, so he has never been able to relax and enjoy it. In his later years he has sought refuge in religion; for what good that may be I know not.”
“Fletcher Daniels was a forestry classmate; his father was Dean of the College of Mines. Fletcher was a seemingly happy-go-lucky sort, but he had a lightning-sharp mind and understood everything the first time around. I admired his quick intelligence. I understand that Fletcher was killed in WWII, so I was never to see him again after our graduation.”
To supplement his studies as an undergrad, Daniel had sent for bulletins from the Government Printing Office, and he also subscribed to the West Coast Lumberman.
“The Dean of the College of Forestry in the beginning of my time there was Hugo Winkenwerder. He was strictly an armchair forester (I would add that the woods are full of armchair foresters!).”
“Professor Alexander was the one who taught our frosh courses in silviculture and mensuration. His knowledge was considerable, but his talent for teaching was sadly lacking. In addition to being a poor communicator of information he was a patsy for apple-polishing; consequently he graded on the basis of student attitude rather than ability. Intellectual honesty was a worthy trait totally lacking in dear Professor Alexander.”
In 1936, while assisting “a coed in rescuing her car from a mudhole,” Daniel tore ligaments in his knee, which later kept him out of military service. “I reported to Fort Lewis for initial assembly and physical examination but I was rejected on account of my knee injury and sent home; I felt bitter despondency and defeat.”
“I felt fortunate then and ever since to have had Walter H. Meyers for my major professor; he was a gentleman and a scholar.”
“This, my first summer in the brush I had my first taste of sin; i.e., I tasted beer for the first time! It tasted to me a bit like green olives. I very much liked green olives and so I was able to learn to like beer in due time with assiduous practice. The boys took up rolling their own Bull Durham; some gained great proficiency. It was the logger-like thing to do.”
“I was disinterested in cigarette smoking; I had tried that at the age six (dried maple leaves) and again at age twelve (Philip Morris samples) but it didn’t appeal to me; no doubt smoking retained its connotation of sinfulness for me. Eventually I decided that, were I to smoke at all, I would smoke a pipe. And so I tried that. Prince Albert at ten cents a tin was my brand. I acquired a variety of pipes, and in time settled on one with a slightly bent stem which I felt revealed proper sophistication, and enjoyed that from time to time as I wandered about. But it tended to bother my teeth, so I gave up on the entire endeavor and I am glad I did. Some of the boys took to chewing snooze (another loggermania), but I could not even stomach the thought of that for myself.”
“When I went back to school in the fall of 1937, at the start of my junior year in forestry, I was full of piss and vinegar. I had gained weight and strength, and confidence in myself.”
This Friday, July 15, moviegoers around Seattle will get their first chance to see Captain Fantastic, a new film starring Viggo Mortensen that is partly set in the old-growth woods of Pack Forest—and shot almost entirely on location in Washington!
A drama that challenges the idea of what it means to be a parent, the story tracks a devoted father (Viggo) who has raised his family in isolation—and off the grid—in the forest until a tragedy forces them to leave their secluded paradise and journey into the outside world. Captain Fantastic‘s world premiere was at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in January, and it won the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Picture at the Seattle International Film Festival earlier this spring.
Starting this Friday, we hope you get a chance to catch the film, and to spot those early scenes set in the gorgeous old-growth stand down at Pack Forest!
From a scene in Captain Fantastic shot in Pack Forest: (left to right) Nicholas Hamilton as Rellian, Annalise Basso as Vespyr, Samantha Isler as Kielyr, George MacKay as Bo, and Viggo Mortensen as their dad Ben. (Credit: Erik Simkins/ Bleecker Street)
In the last issue of Roots, our alumni e-newsletter, we asked our graduates: What was your favorite spot on campus—a place to study, to eat lunch, to go for a walk? Here’s what Tara Wilson (’14, B.S.), who is working nearby as a research technologist with the Center for Conservation Biology, shared with us!
Tara Wilson volunteering at “Meet the Mammals” last year.
“Favorite spot on campus? Well, I don’t think I could pick just one. There are so many different places that are optimal for different things. First of all, hands down, the best place to go for a walk is the Union Bay Natural Area. Yeah, it’s a bit of a hike to get there but totally worth it! It’s a great place to see beautiful habitat, and I like to practice my bird watching (here I come, savannah sparrow!).
As an undergrad, my favorite place to study and get work done was on the top floors of the Suzzallo and Allen libraries. Along the perimeter there are individual desks with tons of outlets and good lighting. Plus, you’re right next to huge windows, which is always nice to gaze out on our campus for inspiration—or procrastination. Whatever you need at the moment.
Finally, I’m going to throw a curveball and say my ultimate favorite place to be is Pack Forest. Although it’s technically not on our Seattle campus, it is a campus for SEFS. It’s the best place to have lunch, hike and even get work done (yes, there’s even a computer lab there! In the forest!). Pack Forest is a gorgeous place, and I think it’s a hidden gem at UW.”
As I’m writing this message, I’m looking out my office windows at another brilliant summer afternoon. This time of year in the Seattle and the Pacific Northwest—clear skies, mountains on every horizon, sails carving up every lake and channel—is especially distracting, and we’re lucky that Summer Quarter is our quietest. Half of every class would be dreamily gazing outside and clamoring for an escape.
Director Tom DeLuca on a recent backpacking trip with his sons in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
It often feels like a reflex or instinct, this yearning to be outdoors, reveling in the infinite variety and beauty of nature. But I have to remind myself that I grew up in a family that had me out skiing all winter, and on extended backpack trips in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Northern Michigan in the summer. We spent countless hours building fence lines, cutting firewood and enjoying every autumn and spring on land we owned and managed in western Wisconsin, or simply playing in the woods by our house on a daily basis.
Not everyone has that same access to parks, open lands or wilderness, or the same opportunities to take advantage of them. Similar to developing a taste for unique foods, our understanding and appreciation of the ‘outdoors’ often starts with exposure to nature on a regular basis, ideally starting at a young age. Without a daily diet of nature, many people never develop an overarching respect for the natural world, and the immense value of its resources. There’s nothing automatic or universal about developing that respect. It’s often the result of years of experience and exploration, honed throughout our lives like so many of our philosophies and passions.
That’s why our role at SEFS is so important. We invest a significant portion of our effort toward instilling our students with a deep sense of respect and value for natural and semi-natural places, with a special emphasis on forests. Our hope is that our students leave here with a sturdy land and conservation ethic, derived from a scientific understanding of how ecosystems function, and how we might best manage lands for the enduring integrity and benefit of humans and all living species alike.
However, as I’ve learned, the taste for nature is best developed young, so we’ve recently launched a number of programs with the goal of capturing the imaginations of young minds much earlier.
After a day of field experiments, students relax around a campfire during one of the first pilots of the Mount Rainier Institute.
This past October, we successfully completed the first pilots of the Mount Rainier Institute (MRI), and this fall we’ll be welcoming the first full season of students. A partnership between Mount Rainier National Park and SEFS, MRI is a residential environmental learning center designed to nurture the next generation of environmental stewards and leaders. The program invites middle school students from all backgrounds—and especially from diverse communities with limited access to parks and other natural spaces—to spend four days and three nights at Pack Forest and Mount Rainier National Park. They learn science by doing science, testing skills like observation, inquiry, analysis, supporting claims with evidence, and presenting their findings. Through these hands-on experiments, along with other fun activities like night hikes and campfires, they build confidence in being outdoors and, we hope, form the beginnings of their own land ethic.
Around the same time last year, we also kicked off a program at the UW Botanic Gardens that targets an even younger audience. The Fiddleheads Forest School immerses preschool-aged children in the natural world, introducing them to their relationships with trees, herbs, insects and mammals. It’s casual and playful, and these young students get to spend time in the beautiful outdoors classroom of the Washington Park Arboretum—an easy place to begin a lifelong love of nature.
Programs like these have me brimming with enthusiasm and confidence in the next generation of environmental leaders and resource managers. Because even if we can’t all grow up with regular access and exposure to nature, we can all grow into responsible stewards and ensure the long-term preservation of the landscapes we value so much.
Tom DeLuca Director, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
As part of the internship, these students worked closely with SEFS graduate students Matthew Aghai, Kiwoong Lee and Emilio Vilanova, as well as forester Jeff Kelly. They participated in a diverse set of activities, including a great amount of time measuring 92 permanent forest plots from the Continuous Forest Inventory (CFI) project. During this time, they became true field experts and were able to update a vital piece of information for the sustainable management of 
