We woke up in the Badlands this morning, after playing hacky-sack in the sunset and catching a glimpse of the bizarre looking Starlink satellite the night before. After packing up our tents, eating breakfast, and loading the vans we were on our way to find plant fossils! We began our day at Big Cedar Ridge,…
Tag: Wyoming Spring Creek Field Studies
Wyoming Spring Creek: Road Trip Day 4
Two days after getting back from our trip around Wyoming, I’m reliving all the incredible experiences we had and mentally preparing myself to leave this amazing state. Laramie and the shortgrass prairie have stolen a piece of my heart, but the northern part of the state–the Bighorns, Yellowstone, the Tetons, and Shoshone National Forest–is so…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Prairie Dogs Holes and the Surrounding Soil
When deciding what I wanted to do for my independent project, I knew that I wanted to do something related to the animals on the property. I’m specifically interested in small mammals, and the abundance of prairie dogs on the property made choosing them to research was an easy choice. Along with their strong presence…
Independent Project – Bizarre Vegetation Bands Along the Mowry Formation
In our first week on the Spring Creek preserve I noticed a strange pattern: Along the hillsides near our camp there were a series of horizontal vegetation bands, alternating between relatively sparse and dense vegetation. I immediately began to question why this was happening. My conclusion was that, since the bands occurred along the strike…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Pollinators of the Snowy Range
For my independent research project, my hypothesis that I investigated was “if the time of day and weather vary (in terms of a temperature, wind, and precipitation), then pollinators will display different behavior.” The materials I utilized in the field included a plant identification guide to ID wildflower species, a clock to time 10-minute intervals,…
Wyoming Spring Creek: A Tale of Two Wetlands
One of the reasons I decided to apply to the Spring Creek Field Studies Program was to learn more deeply about how Earth systems interact to shape the world we see in front of us. Over the first half of the course, I was fascinated by the different plant communities we saw on the preserve…
Wyoming Spring Creek: Climate Change and Water Conservation
If you ever ask what Wyoming’s most precious natural resource is you will predictably be answered by a chorus of responses citing its wealth of oil, coal, and natural gas stores, but in truth its most precious resource is water. One look around the semi-arid landscape and any doubt of what governs life out west…
Wyoming Spring Creek – Carbon Sequestration -Cretaceous to Now
When I was younger, I remember waking up early on a cold January morning, anxiously waiting to see if I would have a snow day or not. As I was not heavily reliant on coffee yet, I would sit with hot chocolate in hand by the light of our Christmas tree we had yet to…
Ecological Research in the Medicine Bow National Forest
For my independent research project in the Wyoming Spring Creek program, I chose to examine riparian and forest ecology in a montane environment. I wanted to see if proximity to a stream affects plant species diversity, depth of duff (dead plant material and leaf litter), and invertebrate activity. My hypothesis is that plant communities proximal…
Wyoming Spring Creek – Uncovering the History of the World
It is easy to take modern geography for granted. The mountains and rivers we see on a daily basis seem so large and immovable that, on a human time scale, they may as well have always been there. But there is a great wealth of geologic history embedded in every one of those formations, and…