LRES Newsletter Fall 2017 Rosie Wallander Fieldwork at Fort Ellis Table of Contents Congrats Grads and Happy Holidays to All! LRES Recognition 2-3 Please enjoy perusing this fall’s departmental newsletter highlighting some of our New Staff 3 many research, teaching, and service pursuits. We currently enroll 200 undergraduate Professional Spotlight 4 students, 88 M.S. students, and 30 Ph.D. students. We want to congratulate our Sabbatical Highlights 5 graduates who have completed their studies this fall. Best wishes to you in your Nielsen Grad Assistantship 5 endeavors! Tracy Sterling, Professor & Department Head New Graduate Students 6 Great Expeditions 6 Stream Restoration Ecology (ENSC 448) Alumni News 7-8 Spanning the classroom and natural laboratory for an immersive learning Mongolian Educators 9 experience That’s a Wrap 10 LRES Capstone Presentation 10 In many stream restoration projects, channels are reshaped to resemble Research & Outreach 11 more natural channel forms, which #WILDCLAY 11 in turn influence water movement, LRES GSO Colloquium 12 nutrient cycling, water temperature, LRES Undergrad Club 12 and aquatic habitat in rivers and on GSO Curriculum Chair 12 floodplains. These ideas form the foundation of the concepts Dr. Geoff Degrees Awarded 13 Poole teaches to students enrolled New Grants 14-15 in “Stream Restoration Ecology” Scholarships 16 (ENSC448), a class offered each fall at Montana State University. In a learning environment that spans the classroom and the natural outdoor laboratory, students are challenged to design and conduct research, think critically about the interplay between science and management, work together in teams to accomplish tasks that feel sometimes insurmountable, Land Resources and and to provide one another critical yet Environmental Sciences constructive feedback on performance and contributions to the class. The P.O.Box 173120 students also integrate the knowledge Bozeman, MT 59717-3120 and skills learned from their earlier undergraduate experiences. landresources.montna.edu The first three weeks of the semester is a crash course in fundamentals of Stream Ecology, consisting of primary literature readings and associated discussions of Continued on page 4 LRES Recognition Continued on Pg. 3 M.S. student Shannon Dillard presented her research on arid-lands Tony Hartshorn collects soil samples Professors Tim McDermott and restoration techniques in Yellowstone with students in Tom Miner Basin Seth Walk (MBI) received a grant at the annual Society for Ecological to study the relationship beween Restoration conference in Foz do Andrew John, microbe-arsenic interactions Iguaçu, Brazil this August. LRES graduate, and the human gut microbiome works with the concerning arsenic levels in state of Idaho to drinking water. Graduate students Florence Miller write permits and (Advisor: Ewing) and Meryl Storb inspect wastewater (Advisor: Payn) got first and second reuse facilities in place respectively in the student oral potato and sugar presentations at the MT American beet processors. Water Resources Association. Rachel Ulrich, a research assistant in Scott Powell’s lab, received an award Regents Professor and ASLO from the Montana NASA EPSCoR Fellow, John Priscu, had his program, to attend the annual meeting work featured in Nature Ecology of the American Association of and Evolution on the extreme Geographers in New Orleans, LA, in ice melt season in Antarctica’s April, 2018. McMurdo Dry Valleys. Priscu also presented his research at the VPR’s 994 Calling Event this Fall. Bruce Maxwell was named the Adam Sigler, in partnership with new director MSU’s Engineers without Borders for Montana’s program, helped to map more than 50 Institute on rural schools and their water resources Ecosystems. in the Khwisero district of western His work Kenya. Juliana D’Andrilli received an contributed award to present research and to the Montana Climate Joe Lazarus received an participate in US-China Workshop Assessment released this year to Undergraduate Research Scholarship on Impacts of a Changing help those in Montana who will from the Initiative for Regulation Cryosphere on Lakes and Streams be impacted by climate change. and Applied Economic Analysis. in Mountain Regions in Qinghai Lake, Xining, China. Laura Ippolito received an Guta Abeshu was awarded a Sam Leuthold recieved an award Undergraduate Research Scholarship scholarship to attend the WaterSmart from the Undergraduate Scholars from the Initiative for Regulation and Innovations Conference in Las Vegas, Program. Applied Economic Analysis. NV this October. Fall 2017 LRES Newsletter 2 LRES Recognition Terry Rick recieved the award this Fall. Her nomination states that “Terry is a stellar research associate because she possesses both field and lab expertise; she has soil sampling, observation and description skills; can fix lab and field Jane Mangold, Stacy Davis, and Audrey Harvey floated the Smith River equipment; can respond to medical with MT FWP and the ASMSU Outdoor Recreation Program in May emergencies; and has produced to help assess and treat weeds along this highly traveled river corridor. thousands of robust soil analyses in This was a multi-day float trip on 59 miles of the Smith River. The support of research.” group stopped at several campgrounds and highly-visited areas to apply Linda herbicides to a variety of weeds including houndstongue, leafy spurge, bull McDonald thistle, and musk thistle. They also had lots of fun admiring steep rock was recognized cliffs, watching soaring birds, eating s’mores, and visiting pictograph sites. at MSU’s Milestones in Dayane Reis Jane Mangold presented Service Awards received an award “Weeds from Obnoxious to Ceremony in from the Montana Noxious” in the MSU 10 x 10 October for State University Roadshow on October 26th. over 35 years of Foundation dedicated and Endowed Fund Kelsey Simon loyal service. for MS Students in received the Hubert J. Entomology. Her poster also placed Byrd Sr. Scholarship Badamgarav Dovchin recieved first in Natural & Social Sciences at Award from the Soil the Soros Foundation Civil Society the Graduate Research Rendezvous. Science Society of Award for Ph.D. students. America. Madelyne Willis received a travel grant from MSU’s Graduate School M.S. student, Rekha to present a poster titled “Detection Bhandari recieved of Organic Matter in Greenland Ice first place in the Cores by Deep-UV Fluorescence” at Graduate ten-minute the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting in New paper competition Orleans, LA this December for the Integrated Pest Management- Rachel Crops 3 Session at the Rawle in Tim Entomological Society of America McDermott’s Conference in Denver, CO. lab was awarded the Kopriva New LRES Staff Logan Parvinen is the LRES graduate student, Kim Roush Graduate traveled to view the 2017 Solar Eclipse Student Student Office Assistant for from the Path of Totality in rural Idaho Fellowship. the LRES main office. Fall 2017 LRES Newsletter 3 ENSC 448 Summary Continued... foundational scientific concepts. The students then participate in the first of two weekend field trips to Spanish Creek, on Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch outside of Bozeman. Students make observations and formulate questions about how ranch operations, especially bison grazing, may be affecting the physical and biotic characteristics of the creek. Based on the observations and questions, each student develops a research plan during the next two weeks of the course, including a hypothesis, prediction, and associated experimental design to validate or invalidate the prediction and support or reject the hypothesis. The second field trip is all about data collection – hopefully before the snow starts flying! Late October can be touch-and-go for field work… Yet the students invariably execute their research plans successfully and acquire the data necessary to challenge their own understanding of how stream ecosystems work. As the snow begins to pile up outside, the focus turns toward data analysis. Students also read and discuss scientific papers and stream restoration manuals that highlight the ways in which research informs stream restoration, and the challenges of incorporating the best science into the on-the-ground realities of stream restoration practices and projects. As students struggle to compile and make sense of their own field data, they also struggle to identify a balance between the possibilities revealed by restoration science and the constraints imposed by the realities of budgets, technology, time, and the omnipresent challenge of seeking alignment between what humans want for natural systems and what we want for ourselves. Lastly, students identify stream restoration case studies from the literature, identify class readings, and lead in-class discussions of real-world restoration projects. At the same time, students compile their results from the individual research projects into an on-line report and associated public presentation, complete with a set of management recommendations for Flying D Ranch operations and restoration actions on Spanish Creek. Over the years, ranch staff have attended these presentations, resulting in some lively discussions of the students’ work. In the end, the class is designed to highlight and leverage the fact that senior-level undergraduates have everything they need to begin to act as producers rather than consumers of information and the confidence to do so. Professional Spotlight Geoffrey Poole, Associate Professor Jane Klassen, Environmental Analytical Laboratory (EAL)