Peace Corps Next Step for Graduating Watershed Scientist

If you think sub-Saharan Africa is an unlikely destination for a scholar who’s spent most of her undergraduate summers conducting research above the Arctic Circle, think again. To Watershed Sciences student Melissa Sanders, change and contrast are natural elements of life. After all, when Sanders started her studies at Utah State University she was a theatre arts major.

The Cache Valley, Utah, native looks forward to her next big adventure, a Peace Corps assignment in Africa, following spring graduation with a bachelor’s degree.

 

“The Peace Corps offered a number of opportunities but serving as an environmental educator appealed to me the most,” says Sanders, who received the 2008 Peak Prize Undergraduate Researcher of the Year award for the College of Natural Resources. “I don’t yet know the country in which I’ll be working but I’m excited about the assignment.”

 

Since her freshman year, Sanders has worked in the lab of Watershed Sciences department head Chris Luecke. The job was initially intended as simply a way of earning cash for college; it soon evolved into much more.

 

Luecke, who serves as a principal investigator for a National Science Foundation-funded Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site, welcomed Sanders’ enthusiasm and innovative thinking. In 2005, he invited her to join his research team, which conducts summer field research from the Toolik Field Station on Alaska’s North Slope.

 

“Melissa’s idea was to look at environmental effects on fish growth rates by combining two approaches,” Luecke says. “Addressing a question in this manner is often a powerful way to gain insights into our understanding of an issue.”

 

For the past three summers, Sanders collected data on eleven populations of Arctic graylings and five populations of lake trout. Each day, she and colleagues traveled from Toolik by helicopter or on foot to various study lakes. At each site they set up grill nets to collect fish.

 

“We looked at the length-to-weight ratios of fish from different lakes to get an idea of their overall health,” Sanders says. “We compared these findings to various physical elements of the landscapes surrounding the lakes.”

 

The goal of the study, she says, was to determine how environmental changes are impacting the fish.

 

Working at Toolik was “like being at summer camp,” Sanders says. In the remote, tight-knit research community, she worked ten-hour days in continuous daylight. On Sundays, her day off, she and colleagues hiked the nearby Brooks Range and enjoyed sightings of wolves, moose, caribou, grizzly bears and their cubs, along with scores of birds.

 

Back on campus, Sanders presented her findings at the 2008 Undergraduate Research Day on Utah’s Capitol Hill and USU’s Student Showcase during April’s Research Week.

 

“I’ve enjoyed the university’s collegial, personalized atmosphere,” she says. “I’ve learned that science isn’t ‘scary,’ a lot about the research process and the kind of work and study I would and wouldn’t like to do.”

 

 

Contact: Chris Luecke (435) 797-2463, chris.luecke@usu.edu
Contact: Melissa Sanders, melissa.sanders@aggiemail.usu.edu
Writer: Mary-Ann Muffoletto (435) 797-3517, maryann.muffoletto@usu.edu