Backcountry Camping Management in Yosemite National Park Wilderness
Faculty mentor/Supervisor:
Ashley D'Antonio
Email Address:
Department Affiliation:
Forest Ecosystems & Society
Project Location:
Corvallis, Oregon (or remotely if needed)
Project Description:
Yosemite National Park is in the process of updating its Wilderness permit system. As part of this project, visitors completed travel diaries during the Spring, Summer, and Fall of 2021. These diaries included questions about Wilderness character and participatory mapping of where visitors camped each night of their trip. These travel diaries will be used in a model to determine the permit numbers per camping zone in Yosemite National Park. We are also interested in understanding if different Yosemite National Park Wilderness visitor groups (etc. PCT thru-hikers, JMT hikers) respond to survey questions about Wilderness character and/or behave differently when camping.
Describe the type of work and tasks you anticipate the student will perform:
This project has two parts, the first involved entering the travel diary survey results into Excel. These results will be summarized in SPSS (or another similar program such as R). The student will generate summary tables and figures from the survey results.
The second part involves digitizing in GIS the locations where visitors camped in Yosemite and connecting these camping locations to the survey results from part one. The student will generate spatial and temporal summaries of the zones where visitors camped and create maps of camping locations by zones.
Hourly rate of pay:
$12.75
Detail your mentorship plan:
Mentorship will be provided in two ways.
First, I will meet with the student weekly for at least one hour. The purpose of these meetings will be for project updates, answering student questions about the project, and then discussing and working on the mentoring needs of the student. Our first meeting will focus on setting up mentoring goals for the MEP program to guide our meetings for the rest of the academic year.
Second, the student will participate in my lab meetings (which are held every other week) with my graduate students, postdoc, and other undergraduate students working in the lab. These meetings often focus on project updates, professional development, and JEDI-related topics. The agenda for these meetings is set by the students and past meetings have focused on topics relevant to undergraduate students including resume/CV building, career options in recreation and tourism, applying to graduate programs, etc. These meetings not only provide mentorship opportunities for the student, but networking opportunities with the graduate students working in my lab as well.