Invasive Species of Crooked Lake & Oden Island

 

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Oden Island: What, Where, and Why

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Oden Island is a small 50 acre island sitting in Crooked Lake in Conway, Michigan. The island itself is a nature preserve, filled with old growth trees and wetlands.  Source: Little Traverse Bay Conservancy  This area is important to me as my family (my extended family, including second and third cousins) has lived in this area for generations. While I grew up in Southern Indiana, we spent our summers and most winter breaks on Crooked Lake. As a child, I spent summers playing in the woods, trying to avoid leeches while I looked for Petoskey Stones on the beach, and taking the boat out to the middle of the lake for a swim or anchoring on the sand bar. I remember when both Asian Carp and Zebra Mussels came to the lake, and my parents telling us how to be on the watch for both given fears of Asian Carp jumping out while someone was skiing, etc. behind a boat, or the deep cuts Zebra Mussels can make on toes and feet. To this day, one of my most favorite things to do (and what tru...
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Exploring the NRCS Web Soil Survey

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  While completely unrelated, my first impression of the NRCS Web Soil Survey was that the interface reminded me of the accounting Cisco platform used at my old agency about ten years ago. I recognized many of the icons and the expand/contract features, and the function of generating excel file reports was the same. I remember at the time feeling that accounting platform was a bit antiquated so went into this assignment with that assumption. However, my experience with this platform was much more positive! I appreciated the fact the tool provided correction / trouble shooting prompts to me throughout my exploration. For example, at first I didn't correctly select my area of interest (AOI) and when I tried to click the Soil Map tab, received an error message with instructions of how to correctly navigate.  With this error message prompt, I quickly understood how to select my AOI, as shown here.  From there, I was able to generate a soil map of my AOI, and the corresponding...
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What is Biodiversity? And, Why Does it Matter?

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 What is Biodiversity? Generally speaking, biodiversity represents the varied collection of both known and unknown (i.e., not yet discovered) species of plants, animals, and other organisms like fungi and bacteria. These species working and existing together results in unique ecosystems. Source: The Santa Cruz Mountains Bioregional Council And, Why Does it Matter?  Biodiversity is  itself life, but it also supports human life. As humans, we rely on natural resources to survive, and biodiversity is crucial to ensure those natural resources - for example, clean water - can continue to be available.  At the local level, biodiversity ensures local ecosystems function properly and are able to provide services to the surrounding community, from pollinating flowers or crops, keeping the number of invasive species in check, or helping to ensure migratory species (who also provide ecosystems services) have a safe habitat and abundant food source.  Regionally, biodiversit...
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