Monitoring technology and innovation expert
What got you interested in ecology (or your related field)?
When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by the science of science fiction. In particular, terraforming planets to be hospitable to humans. This was also when the Viking missions were going to Mars, showing a bleak red landscape and showing data from another planet – temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, etc. I wondered what it would really take to get that landscape to support plants and animals. I also grew up in the Driftless Area, an area of primarily southwestern Wisconsin that was left alone during the last glaciation period if the Ice Age around 10,000 years ago. This geologic feature allowed for a lead and zinc mining industry to flourish. One of the ways to extract the ore from the bedrock was a process of roasting the bedrock which left piles of iron rich limestone with a lot of heavy metals which didn’t allow vegetation to grow. These looked a lot like the pictures of the Marian landscape. While at college, I studied reclamation (the definition really intrigued me – putting the land back to some useful purpose after it has been abused by man) and natural restoration (the process of returning degraded or damaged ecosystems of the place to a more healthy state) and participated in some studies about these roaster piles – primarily looking at the low pH levels of the water due to the heavy metals associated with the tailings piles. It is exciting to see an area transformed from a neglected, crippled landscape to a vibrant healthy ecosystem with a diversity of plants, animals, and fungi.
What do you love/inspires you most about your area of expertise?
I love figuring out how to understand our environment. There are so many things around us that we don’t recognize until we really investigate what is there, whether that is using an ultrasonic microphone to hear bats, digging a hole in the ground to see how close the water is to ground level, or even looking at a vegetative assessment quadrat to determine all of the plant species within that square meter.
What's the weirdest or funniest thing you've seen in the field
The funniest thing in the field is me. I really like a good pun and enjoy being in the field so much that the jokes just naturally come out. What's one interesting fact about you we need to know? I have been called a combination of MacGyver and Q of field work. I like to identify what equipment can be used to efficiently and effectively measure the parameters of the environment we are looking at, then implement that equipment in the field making sure the equipment and data is accessible to those who need the data and inaccessible to wildlife, vandals and other detrimental effects of the environment.
What would your wish be for our planet's future?
That we, as human caretakers of the earth, get better at fixing the issues we have created and prevent new ones from causing further harm.
What's one thing we didn't ask you that you want to share?
Restoring a resilient earth for a modern world only works if we haven’t already thoroughly destroyed that environment. I have been in the ecological field for 30 years and see that it is increasingly important to preserve whatever vestige of a natural community that is left before it is gone for good. With each mitigation project, we are enabling the earth to be a little more resilient.
