Welcome to Brazen Careerist!

About Me

I'm a field botanist- I like to say I get paid to hike and look at wildflowers. While most of what I've done is surveying for sensitive species in project areas- future clear cuts and the like- my real interest is ecological studies. I've been lucky enough to work on a few projects that piqued my interest- and I have a couple of my own- small scale, but close to my heart. I have a long term fixed plot study, looking at the results of a meadow rehabilitation, and I'm trying to find new populations- and possibly an expanded range- for a sensitive lily in the Trinity Alps. The projects I've done as part of jobs are somewhat grander in scale- I spent a year organizing and surveying for a project that looked at the likely impact of global warming for plant populations on serpentine and normal soils throughout California, I took part in a study of species found in clear cuts compared to the surrounding forest, and worked on a project that studied the impact of reducing the buffer zones on streams. I'd like to work on more projects like that- and I'd like to work on more than just the data entry- I'd like to see how something like that works from start to finish.

My first love is botany, but as long as I'm outside most of the year, I'm willing to do any ecological job.

Work History

• University of California, Davis
• Field Botanist
• October 2008 to October 2009

• Co-ordinated and conducted surveys on variation between serpentine flora and flora of non-serpentine sites in the Sierra Nevada Range, South Coast Ranges, North Coast Ranges, and Klamath Range.

• USDA Forest Service- Shasta Trinity NF
• Biological Technician- Botany
• May 2008 to September 2008

• Surveyed for noxious weeds and threatened, endangered, and sensitive plants. Collected native seeds for revegetation projects.

• Sierra Pacific Industries
• Botany Technician
• April 2006 to April 2008

• I took part in several surveying projects throughout Northern California. These included intuitive control rare plant surveys, wildlife habitat surveys using Pious plots, and complete floristic surveys using line intercept and random plot methods.

Education

• University of California, Davis
• Plant Biology, Evolution and Ecology
• 2001 - 2005