eDNA TRAINING IN COLORADO

I am a member of the Conservation and Ecological Genetics Team. While I started my position here at ERDC (9.5 years ago!) working on the population genetics of threatened and endangered species (as I did for my master's degree before), the nature of our workplace (soft money, competition for funding, changing climate of research interest among the higher-ups, etc.) leads teams to continually expand their areas of focus. One of those expansions was the emergence of eDNA methods (quite a few years ago now), as first applied to Asian carp monitoring, and now used to identify and track invasives as well as TES and elusive species. When my team first took on the Asian carp monitoring task, I was the one "left behind" to finish up other projects (because pop gen is my specialty). As such, I have been more out of the loop than in as far as the progression of eDNA methods and uses over the past few years, but as our team pushes forward with incorporating eDNA into many of our current and future projects, I need to get up to speed. My supervisor and others in the government eDNA group put together an eDNA Training and Technical Exchange Workshop (held at the Federal Center in Lakewood, CO, since it's pretty central to most of the nationwide eDNA researchers), so I spent the beginning of this week learning nearly everything there is to know about eDNA collection, processing, and analyzing. It was a great event and I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to go (not only did I learn a lot, but I got to meet a lot of our collaborators in person and make some potential new funding connections), though I greatly missed my family (especially because James was VERY sick all week and I don't like being away from my kids on a normal day, let alone when they feel terrible and are sick enough to make Jay worry).

Sitting almost behind the pilot on my first flight... The flight attendant and I could have held hands.

The view from South Table Mountain. We took a 3-ish mile hike with some of the other workshop attendees the night we arrived where we gained 1600ft elevation, walked a big flat loop up top, then descended. The downhill was the portion that REALLY hurt my still healing quads. I waddled a lot on Monday and Tuesday...

Angry rattlesnake on the trail. Had to go around. And watch for snakes off trail...

The view northeast towards Denver.

Sharing an Ironworks sampler (shared because the pours were so large) with a coworker one evening.

Touring some of the BOR's river/dam models and concrete testing stations.

Hoover Dam

Aren't they pretty?
These lined the walls in a building so big that employees use bicycles to get from one end to the other.

Glen Canyon Dam model. I'd like to see the real one someday...

Last night in Colorado required a trip over to Red Rocks Park (adjacent to the Red Rocks Amphitheater) for a little bit of hiking and trail running (my legs were finally feeling mostly normal by Wednesday), since it was a mere 15 minutes from our hotel.

Irene, me, and Xin, ready to pound the red dirt! (Rick took the picture for us.)

This place was pretty incredible. We would have loved to go into the amphitheater too, to see that in person, but it was open to concert attendees only. Red Rocks sits at 6200ft elevation, and we most definitely felt it while we were running. There was a lot of walking back up the loop to the visitor center... which was fine, because it gave us plenty of time to take photos and view the wildlife (3 deer, 2 rabbits, 1 snake, and lots of magpies and other pretty birds).

Just me and John Denver. And an eagle.