30 May Updates from Jade and the Eastern Planning Service Group

Hello everyone! Here are a few updates from my time with the Eastern Planning Service Group: I attended an ESRI GIS User conference in West Palm Beach earlier this month, we are continuing to develop new approaches to best choose Species of Conservation Concern, and I have continued to build connections outside our organization and might work on a project with Enterprise (a program with the Forest Service that acts almost as a consulting group).

The conference I attended was very informative; I learned about the new tools available in ArcGIS Pro and their new generative and other AI prototypes. I also had a chance to attend talks on the practical uses of ESRI tools, including one that helped keep track of the Burmese Python removal efforts in the Everglades, one on better capturing sea turtle nesting data, and some on public safety during hurricanes and other natural disaster events. Overall, the conference was really fun, and I even ran into an old classmate from Georgia Southern University!

The species group within the Eastern Planning Service Group has doubled in size! And we now have three more wildlife biologists who have a wealth of knowledge and experiences working with wildlife and the Forest Service. It has been helpful to hear different perspectives and interpretations on the main issue we are tackling right now: species of conservation concern. Three of us, including the other resource assistant (Viviana), have also been working with the Washington Office to help develop communication products to better explain the concept of species of conservation concern to the units and the public. Viviana and I will also be co-presenting a PowerPoint presentation we made to some biologists at the Regional 9 office on Region 8’s process to choose a species of conservation concern. The biggest challenge, as I see it right now, is that we (the entire Forest Service) are lacking consensus on how to tackle this issue. Every region and every unit approach problems differently, they have different processes and ways they store data. So, it makes sense they would also tackle species of conservation concern differently, especially because the law and forest handbook directives leave a lot of room for interpretation. However, a cohesive approach would help the Forest Service appear more unified, which might be useful when a list of species of conservation concern is open to objections from the public, for example.

Networking has always been difficult for me, as an introvert, but I have forced myself to get out of comfort zone since the beginning of this internship. I even reached out to the Forest Service national GIS coordinator! I have seen how valuable these connections that I am building can be, and as a result, more opportunities are becoming available to me. These experiences and conversations have made me less hesitant to reach out, advocate for myself and ask for what I want.

Here are some photos I took for the botany taxonomic class I completed this month and one from the ESRI user conference!