Cascade Meadows: Student Interns 2017

For the second summer in a row, GSS staff assisted in supervising summer student interns at the University's Cascade Meadow Wetlands and Environmental Science Center in Rochester, MN. The interns were junior Environmental Biology majors Katie Ethen and Abby Propsom.

Interns on the Cascade Meadows lake!

In May 2017, the interns removed nearly a dozen large garbage bags full of garlic mustard, an invasive noxious weed, from a tree line on site.

Under the guidance of SMU Biology Department faculty and GSS staff, the students worked to control invasive plant species in wetland and prairie restorations, established and sampled vegetation plots, collected aquatic data from the on-site lake, and helped to document 170 plant species on the property, over which 120 are native! This year, interns also documented bird and small mammal species found on site. 

The Cascade Meadows interns and supervisors Kathy Allen (GSS) and Moni Berg-Binder (Biology) shared lessons learned from the Cascade Meadow and how it related to other native plant gardens during a presentation August 29th at the Cascade Meadow Center as part of the Stormwater Presents Speaker Series, a monthly program featuring topics related to stormwater management in the City of Rochester. The interns are also preparing a poster about their vegetation samples results to present at an undergraduate research conference fall 2017.

Presenting at the Stormwater Presents Speaker Series