{"id":990,"date":"2021-08-30T14:30:21","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T18:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.seagrant.w3.uvm.edu\/2021\/08\/30\/watershed-science-internships-benefit-students-and-landowners\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T17:49:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T21:49:15","slug":"watershed-science-internships-benefit-students-and-landowners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/2021\/08\/30\/watershed-science-internships-benefit-students-and-landowners\/","title":{"rendered":"Watershed Science Internships Benefit Students and Landowners"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSeveral Vermont high school and college students recently completed internships with the Lake Education and Action Program<\/a> (LEAP) and gained valuable work experience and water quality knowledge while educating landowners about protecting local waterways.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe program, led by the Poultney Mettowee Natural Resource Conservation District<\/a>, is supported by Lake Champlain Sea Grant and University of Vermont (UVM) Extension<\/a>. It was expanded this year to partner with Friends of the Winooski River<\/a>, Missisquoi River Basin Association<\/a>, and the Winooski Natural Resource Conservation District<\/a> to offer watershed science professional development opportunities to more students.<\/p>\n

\n\t“The program’s benefits are multi-faceted,” says Lake Champlain Sea Grant’s Kris Stepenuck. “It provides career training for young adults, education for landowners, and shoreline protection to benefit water quality all in one package.”<\/p>\n

\n\tLEAP encourages and facilitates stewardship projects by landowners that restore stream or shoreline habitat and decrease runoff to streams and lakes. Interns help develop educational materials and provide public outreach although also benefit from hands-on learning, such as rain garden maintenance,\u00a0planting trees and shrubs, or restoring or expanding stream banks to create lakeshore vegetative buffers.<\/p>\n

\n\t“For many students, LEAP offers STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) opportunities,” Stepenuck says, “often in locations where STEM jobs are few and far between. An added benefit of LEAP is that it strengthens and expands relationships between the partner organizations\u00a0and Lake Champlain Sea Grant.”<\/p>\n

\n\tStudents selected as summer interns and their work experiences were as follows:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFriends of the Winooski River<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAiden Casey, of Woodbury, Vermont, and Lukas Draugelis, of Washington, D.C., spent the summer working with landowners in the Kingsbury Branch subwatershed to encourage participation in the Vermont Lake Wise Program<\/a>, which promotes implementation of lakeshore best management practices. They also monitored and maintained previously planted sites and learned how to use the Natural Resources Atlas<\/a>, developed by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources<\/a>, to collect information from landowners with properties that have\u00a0ponds, streams, and other bodies of water.<\/p>\n

\n\tCasey will be a first-year student at Dartmouth College this fall, while Draugelis will enter his junior year at UVM.<\/p>\n

\n\tMissisquoi River Basin Association<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tVermont residents, Kendra Pepin, of Troy, and Anthony Plante, of Richford, worked with landowners on small-scale riparian plantings and to control invasive knotweed along streams and riverbanks. As part of this project, they assessed how water flows across properties and ways that it could potentially impact water quality. They also conducted riparian buffer planting success surveys and provided rain garden maintenance.<\/p>\n

\n\tPepin will attend the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry this fall.\u00a0Plante will be a senior at Richford Junior Senior High School.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPoultney Mettowee\u00a0Natural Resource Conservation District<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tVermonters Benjamin Gynan, of Ira; Toby Pylik, of Wallingford; and Cadish Smid, of Middletown Springs,\u00a0helped with shoreline plantings and rain garden maintenance, assisted at a native plant nursery, and provided information to landowners on ways to protect water quality. They practiced their Secchi disk skills and observed volunteers at Lake Saint Catherine to learn how to collect lake data through water sampling. In addition, they removed invasive\u00a0plant species from along shorelines with assistance from Sadie Brown, Champlain Valley Native Plant Restoration Nursery in Poultney. Toby Crispin, of Poultney, a seasonal employee with the district for the past three summers, coordinated\u00a0the day-to-day LEAP schedule and intern oversight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGynan and Smid will be sophomores at Long Trail School in Dorset\u00a0this fall. Pylik will be a freshman at Mill\u00a0River Union High School in Clarendon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWinooski Natural Resource Conservation District<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSummer technical field interns Sage Doviak and Max Hooper provided outreach to landowners along streams and tributaries in the Browns River and Mallets Creek watersheds and visited previously planted riparian sites to evaluate survival rates and hone their tree identification skills. They collected water quality samples from urban streams with the Rethink Runoff Stream Team initiative and assisted with\u00a0water sampling on agricultural land.<\/p>\n

\n\tDoviak and Hooper are both UVM graduates and current Burlington, Vermont residents.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo learn more about LEAP, go to https:\/\/go.uvm.edu\/lcsg-leap<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several Vermont high school and college students recently completed internships…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1634,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=990"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uvm.edu\/seagrant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}