A Berry Full Summer: An ACRC Intern Experience
Hey! My name is Poppy McBride, and I am in my senior year of the Environmental Science program at UAS. I’ve been in Alaska, and Juneau specifically, for over 3 years now, but I am originally from the southeast corner of Portland, Oregon. Throughout this past summer, I have had the privilege of working with ACRC faculty member and professor of forest ecology Dr. Logan Berner, USFS research forester Dr. Kellen Nelson, and USFS research ecologist Dr. Kathryn Baer as an undergraduate research fellow in partnership with the Oak Ridge Institute (ORISE).
The couple of projects we’re working on focus on the abundance and growing patterns, or phenology, of highbush blueberry species and how they are impacted by forest and climate conditions. By last winter, I had taken a couple of Logan’s classes and had been looking at summer work when he brought up the idea of working as a student intern on the abundance side of the project. It wasn’t until a little later in the semester that Kellen spoke with Logan about Katie’s phenology monitoring project and the student position being open. My name had been brought up, and I ended up applying to the ORISE position, then met with Kellen, Katie, and Logan to talk about conducting the projects side by side.
It’s difficult to choose one favorite experience from this summer because I feel lucky to have experienced it all. The easiest experiences to highlight have got to be the trips I was able to go on for fieldwork. In total, I travelled to three different locations outside of Juneau.
Our first trip of the field season had us waking up around 4:30 AM for the ferry ride up to Haines. Logan, Alyson (UAS alum & graduate student at the University of Helsinki), Robbie (fellow ACRC Intern), and I loaded everything into the van and headed for the terminal. After getting into Haines, we drove to meet with the folks we were working with at the Chilkat Indian Village tribal headquarters in Klukwan. For the next week, we met and worked with Sandrine, Tommy, Willie, Karlie, and her daughter Aaliyah to select sites, collect measurement data, and pick a whole lot of berries. Exploring around Klukwan, getting a tour of the Jilkaat Kwaan Heritage Center from Jack, having a community meeting about our work, and enjoying some community time in Klukwan and Haines were all probably the highlights of the trip.
After a field week back in Juneau, Taylor (fellow blueberry buddy & ACRC Intern), Logan, and I headed out to Sitka for the next round of data collection. I think we might’ve gotten the luckiest weather streak for our fieldwork because it was warm and sunny nearly the whole time. We met with Taylor, Zofia, and Ellie, along with some of the other folks at the Sitka Sound Science Center, who kindly let us use some of their bear spray and space for the week. We explored to find some spots for sampling that day, but Ellie really showed off the better spots for some scenic and productive surveying. Still pretty sure I saw some of the biggest spruce trees I’ve seen in my life. On our last night, Taylor hooked us up with the chance to boat out to one of the nearby islands with some friends for a little sunset campfire!
With another week in between traveling over, I headed off to Anchorage during the first week of classes to catch the last part of the blueberry season. This time I was flying out on my own, but I was meeting up with Katie for the week, who kindly let me borrow her truck for the trip. The goal was to show her what we had been measuring down south and collect some additional sites for the north side of our spectrum. Things worked a little slower with just the two of us at first; it poured the first day we were out, and we had gotten one of the tree cores stuck pretty bad earlier in the day, so I think by the end we left a little frustrated with the whole survey part. The rest of the week lightened up. We got a flow going that worked really well and ended up having fun with the process again! We used some of our extra time for exploring around Whittier and checking out the Portage Glacier while we were in that direction on a couple of different days. On one of our drives out, we saw 1-2 of the Cook Inlet Belugas too. It was also lovely getting to stay and hang out with a couple of my friends while I was there and check out the state fair!
There were also a couple of different times this season where I got to go out for some of the other projects happening within the ACRC. At one point, I went out to Davies Creek with Elizabeth, Jasmine, and Ash, where they showed me the ropes for tromping around in the swamp, which was super cool, but those mosquitoes are no joke. Another time I got to go out blue mussel collecting, splitting, scooping, and blending with Dr. Megan Behnke and Sydney. I think I could go a little longer without blending mussels, but it was cool to learn about!
Aside from the field side of this project, I feel like I have been allowed to explore my own goals and figure out what I really wanted to get out of the experience. I’m still helping out with this project but have moved towards photo processing, exploring our data, and working on a side project for the Alaska Space Grant program! All in all, I don’t think it was originally planned for these projects to run side by side with each other, but it all really lined up well, and I could not express how grateful I am to be a part of this experience and for everyone at the ACRC, USFS Research Station, and UAS.