Monitoring trail use Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Faculty mentor/Supervisor:
Ashley D'Antonio (co-mentoring with postdoc scholar, Evan Bredeweg)
Email Address:
Department Affiliation:
Forest Ecosystems & Society
Project Location:
Remote (can be conducted anywhere)
Project Description:
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado is consistently one of the top 10 most visited parks in United States. Each year Rocky Mountain National Parks continues to see increasing visitation which can lead to social and ecological impacts. Since 2008, Rocky Mountain National Park has been using automatic trail counters to monitor visitor use at numerous trails throughout the park. While Rocky Mountain National Park has analyzed this data for each year individually, they have not yet evaluated the trail counter data to examine trends over time. This project would examine if and how visitor use has changed at various trailheads across time, including changes in relative proportions of use.
Describe the type of work and tasks you anticipate the student will perform:
Organizing data; calculating means, standard deviations, and proportions for large datasets (in Excel or R); mapping trail counter locations in a GIS environment; summarising results in table and figure format (in Excel or R); writing up any trends observed in the data.
Hourly rate of pay:
$12.00
Detail your mentorship plan:
Ashley and Evan will work together to co-mentor the student. One to two-hour mentoring meetings (via Zoom) will be set-up for once a week during the duration of the student's employment in the MEP program. During the first mentoring meeting we will inquire about the mentorship goals that the student may have and subsequent meetings will be scheduled and revolve around the interests and needs of the student. The student will also be invited to participate in conference calls and Zoom meetings with our partners at Rocky Mountain National Park. Finally, in addition to one-on-one meetings with Ashley and Evan - the student will also be invited to participate in Ashley's lab group meetings. These meetings include other graduate students that work with Ashley. These meetings will give the MEP protege exposure to other types of recreation-related research and professional development opportunities (past lab meetings have covered topics such as: the journal publicatoin process, science communication, etc.