Week Four With the PSRM Crew!

Hello again everyone!

For week four I spent my time with the resource management division. Essentially, this division is a biology division in the Santa Monica Mountains.  The people in this division look at plants and animals to look at the health of the ecosystem. I also spent the day with my supervisor doing law enforcement activities which was incredibly interesting.

The first day I worked with a man named Mark. He looks at the vegetation in plotted areas to look at the health. This is especially important after last years devastating fire to see how the ecosystem will end up recovering. Mark explained to me that for vegetation they randomly pick a plot of land that is 30 meters by 10 meters and check it annually. This particular plot of land that was picked was on the side of a mountain that we had to hike up. This hike was only about 100 meters up but it was literally at almost a 45 degree angle which was such a blast to hike up (If my dad is reading this: picture walking up Challenger at Blue Mountain!). So once we got up there we roped off the plot of land that we were looking at and begun. What he looks for when he checks the plots of land is native species. So he would dissect each part of the land counting the plants, seedlings, dead plants, etc. Mark is a genius and can identify almost every plant by its genes name even if it is just a seedling. It was fascinating to watch. What I did while he was doing this was plug in all of the data he was yelling out.

This is a shot of Mark and I plotting the land to work in.

Falling wouldn't have been a very good time.

A picture of me giving the thumbs up so Mark knows I'm not dying walking through the thorns.

The next day I worked with a woman named Ashley. On this day we worked at the trails right outside where I am living (gotta love the short commute) to do similar work. This time, however, we looked at random 500 meter segments along the trails. Then instead of looking at native species Ashley was looking for invasive and non indigenous species. PSRM looks for certain vegetation to maintain or even eradicate if they can to keep the ecosystem as natural as possible. She also took me to a place called the plant nursery. This is where she and her fellow coworkers can run experiments to look at the health of the plants or grow plants that they believe need some help.

This is within the plant nursery where they can conduct experiments.

The last day I worked with PSRM I was with two people named Josh and Andrea. This day we worked with animals rather than vegetation. The animals are checked on multiple times a week which is way more often than vegetation (animals are more mobile and dynamic species). Essentially they set up traps to be able to check on animals in the area. There are many days where they come up with nothing but that was not the case when I was shadowing. We saw many scorpions, centipedes, a toad, a shrew (type of rodent), and even an alligator lizard (my personal highlight). When we found these species we would record the approximate age, weight, and length of these animals. You can tell the health of an ecosystem by the types of animals that you find and the health of the specific animals that you find.

This is one of the traps that they look for animals in

The inside of the trap. The sponge is there as a water source and the PVC pipes are there for the animals to go into. At the bottom right you can see the shrew!

Hello there!

As you can see he's excited to be here.

This is the alligator lizard! As you can see he was pretty big!

What a happy fella.

The last day of my work week I spent the day with my supervisor. The law enforcement rangers at SAMO were in the middle of training days so I got to tag along and even participate during this day. On this day we did defense tactics (for you ProRangers who went to leadership camp: we did some familiar tactics such as tac falls, tac rises, high clench, and low clench). After this we drove to an area called Calabasas (you may know this area because of the Kardashians...didn't see any of them though so I'm pretty broken up about it). Here we met up with different law enforcement agencies and there was a two part presentation on school shootings. For the first part, a detective had a talk where he walked us through an incident with powerpoint slides and videos of the incident (because there were cameras in the school that got the whole thing). He then got to one of his main points which was that he believes more law enforcement (an all first responders) should be EMT certified and that would save so many more lives. After the detective presented there was another part of the presentation that came from more of the education side. A school superintendent talked about how we can try and prevent these incidents in the first place. His suggestion was to invest in the kids. Develop deep relationships with them and really nurture their mental health. This was especially powerful in my opinion.


CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:
I thought that all of the law enforcement agencies getting together was very special. Apparently they all meet quarterly to talk about different issues. Some issues they covered were homelessness, school shootings, and fires. This type of working together was very impressive to me and it was cool to be apart of. I think it's so important for agencies to work together and have solid dialogues to be able to be the most efficient in helping people.