“Hope everyone has been well and got a chance to enjoy the holidays. Things have been going well with myself. Currently living here in Eugene with my girlfriend, Cassandra. Still living the life of a seasonal technician; bouncing from agency to agency. Summer of 2016, I was hired as a crew leader for AREMP, the inter-agency stream monitoring program I was a part of in 2014. I had a great time traveling all over N. California, Oregon, and Washington and got to expand my resume with supervisory experience. Also, a recent addition to the AREMP protocol was environmental DNA sampling. A method of stream sampling I’ve been increasingly involved and interested in.
During the winter, I’ve been working up at the Northwest Research Station. Dr. Reeves has me in the lab helping some undergrads learn to read Coho scales from the Copper River Delta. Which is great, since winter work in natural resources can be tough to find. Fortunately, I’m also going to start work with the Calapooia Watershed Council in February. I will be conducting spawning surveys for steelhead in the Upper Calapooia as a Fisheries Monitoring Technician. It is only a temporary position but I’ve recently been getting the feeling that working for a watershed council might be a perfect fit and was excited to be hired.
However, despite my passion for hiking up steep hills through devil’s club and vine maple, I have my sights set on graduate school. Depending on the program and adviser, I would like to investigate the methodology used in environmental DNA stream sampling and how detection rates vary seasonally for certain aquatic species. It is my hope that my experience working with researchers over the past years, both in the field and laboratory, will help me succeed. But until then, I would like to thank the North Umpqua Foundation for their continued support and wish everyone a prosperous 2017!
Best,
Cris Salazar”
