We are so excited to welcome our new AmeriCorps member, Alex Carey! Alex will be helping coordinate restoration at Deer Creek Ranch, monitor water quality on Deer Creek and Bear River, create and share social media content, dive into our climate change study, and so much more! We’ll let Alex introduce herself below:
Hello everyone, my name’s Alex and I just started as the AmeriCorps member for Sierra Streams Institute on October 15th. I’m very happy to be joining such a dedicated group of citizen scientists, California naturalists, and supporters.
I was born and raised in San Francisco, but I grew up spending summers with my grandma running around the Sierra Nevada foothills. After a life in the Bay Area, I am excited to explore all I can around Nevada City. I just graduated UC Berkeley in the Spring with a BS in Environmental Science and Forestry. I have worked in a freshwater ecology lab for the past two years, getting to go on massive snorkel surveys of native Salmonids in a Mendocino river, filming larval dragonflies eating fish fry (you read that correct!) and spending many hours identifying aquatic insects for my senior thesis. This past summer I switched gears and helped on a plant physiology project studying how trees uptake water and Nitrogen from weathered bedrock using isotope analysis. I got to collect roots meters down in hillsides and even climb to the top of a Giant Sequoia in Sequoia National Park. For now I’m excited to get to know these new watersheds and eat all the tasty things this town has to offer!