Hello, my name is Jocelyn Stansberry and I am a wildlife biology student at the University of Montana. For my Beyond the Classroom Experience, I conducted research in Olympic National Park. The work was divided between intertidal coastal surveys and high alpine lake surveys. For each area, several different surveys were conducted to add to a long-term data set in order to best understand the impacts of our changing climate. Most of my work consisted of backpacking out to different locations to conduct the harder to reach survey sites. I composed a video of my time hiking, backpacking, and surveying for the coastal time period of my research, which can be found on my Instagram @jocelyn_s__. I have also included photos of the hikes out to our high alpine lakes. In these images, I am standing on a few of the many unmarked ridges my crew and I traveled on to reach the mountain lakes, or in the lakes that we surveyed for fish, frogs, and various physical science elements.

This Beyond the Classroom Experience provided me the opportunity to work in my dream position, collecting climate data for the National Park Service. My day-to-day experience varied with every week but ensured that I was constantly in the field, whether that meant I was wading through tidepools, digging dragonfly larvae out of mud, or backpacking miles into the mountains. During my time at Olympic, I learned vast amounts of knowledge about coastal ecology and limnology from the park’s lead marine biologist which furthered my connections for future positions in the park service. I believe understanding how the ocean is impacted by climate will be one of the most crucial science fields in our contemporary climate condition. My time in the Olympics has only emphasized these ideas and I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to begin my scientific journey with the assistance of the GLI program