Hello everyone! The last two months have flown by in the blink of an eye while I have been working on the Quantitative Conservation Safeguards for Oil and Gas Effects project in New Mexico. After I finished collecting all the data from the oil and gas pads in Farmington, NM, I moved on to data quality control and analysis.

Although I have worked with GIS data in R for around three years for my master’s thesis, I have not had the opportunity to use ArcGIS Pro until working on this project. Learning how to use new software can be intimidating, but my supervisor was very patient and helpful when teaching me how to work with my data in this new setting. I was eager for this opportunity to learn this new software, especially because of the many different ways it can be used in conservation work. After a few training sessions and time working independently, my data was ready to move to R for preliminary statistical analyses. 

This last week I was also excited to help with the Conservation Germplasm Collections for the T&E Plants project. For this, I got to travel to the Chuska Mountains in Arizona and the Zuni, Datil, and Sawtooth Mountains in New Mexico to collect Erigeron rhizomatus (Zuni fleabane) seeds. I was very grateful to be part of the seed collections because they play a key role in the conservation of this threatened species. Although some of the hiking was on steep sandy hills, I was more than happy to be outside hiking and helping. It was also very interesting to see how the population sizes and habitats differed at each site.

In the next week, I will be heading to Carlsbad to continue my transect surveys of oil and gas pads. I am excited to compare how these key oil and gas areas of New Mexico differ in the way their pads are set up and how the wildlife around them has responded. After the sampling in Carlsbad is done, I will continue my data analysis and prepare my final presentation! I am very grateful for the opportunity to work on such impactful projects and continue to learn more about the oil and gas in New Mexico.

Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Program: Directorate Fellows Program

Location: New Mexico Ecological Services Field Office