Meet the NWT summer field techs: Kenya and Sammy!

Niwot Ridge LTER is welcoming some exciting new additions to our NWT team this summer! We will be posting introductions/welcomes to each new researcher in the upcoming weeks. This week we would like to welcome Sammy and Kenya, who will be joining our team as summer field techs:

Kenya Gates:

"Hi! I’m Kenya Gates, a senior undergraduate student in the EBIO department at CU Boulder, and this will be my third season working at Niwot Ridge LTER. I am fascinated by plant-fungi interactions and began my research career studying the relationships between beetle kill-affected spruce trees and their endophytic partners while I was attending Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, CO. I fell in love with Niwot Ridge when I was awarded an REU internship in 2018, during which I studied mycorrhizal associations with alpine plants under the supervision of the Spasojevic lab out of UC Riverside. 

In 2019 I was hired back on as a general field technician for NWT, and this year I will be focusing on vegetation biology and helping to maintain the research site’s long-term botanical datasets. I am extremely excited to be back at the Ridge and to be working on such important datasets, which, paired with climate and geochemical data, may show how anthropogenic factors impact alpine ecosystems over time."

Sammy Yevak:

“I graduated from CU Boulder in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. During my time at CU Boulder I began working with the Limnology group of the Niwot Ridge LTER as a REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) student, from there my passion and interest for water in alpine environments led me to become the Niwot LTER Limnology Research Technician for the past two summers. 

As a Niwot LTER Limnology Research Technician, I work mainly in the Green Lakes Valley protected watershed. Each summer the City of Boulder grants a few researchers special access into the watershed. Our main objective in the watershed is to collect long-term water quality data from three alpine lakes. We also maintain and collect data from a sensor buoy located in our highest elevation lake: Green Lake 4 (3550 m). “