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Doctoral student Shirah Strock will travel from the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) LTER to the Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER. She will receive hands-on training in ViQi, an AI platform used to quantify sessile organism (algae, invertebrate) recruitment from long-term benthic imagery.

Lin Hou, A PhD student at the California Current (CCE) LTER site, will visit the Northeast Shelf (NES) LTER to refine her Imaging Flow Cytobot (IFCB) analysis techniques, drawing on approaches used in the Sosik lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Dr. Nicholas Medina will travel to the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) LTER and sample soils for eDNA extraction and ITS sequencing. The results will complement MSP data on tree distribution, soil nutrients, heavy metals, and earthworms, while expanding Nicholas’ work on the temporal dynamics of mycorrhizal fungal exploration traits.

Brittany Washington, a PhD student with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, will visit the two LTER urban sites: Central Arizona-Phoenix (CAP) LTER and Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) LTER to become familiar with groundwater connectivity and how it is assessed at these two very different LTER sites.

Melissa plans to visit the Konza Prairie (KNZ) LTER to observe a field trip in action and get inspiration for what could be possible in the KBS partnership network and schoolyard research. She is planning long-term data collection at a distributed network of schoolyards and would like to base her approach on that taken by KNZ Education Manager Jill Haukos.

Cameron Clay will visit Luquillo (LUQ) LTER to learn how to install, process, and analyze minirhizotron monitoring systems working with Dr. Tana Wood and Laura C. Rubio Lebrón. At MSP, Cameron will deploy a minirhizotron system into an existing floodplain forest experiment. The skills he gains in Puerto Rico will allow for the creation of parallel projects at these two LTER sites to test how extreme fluctuations in soil moisture affect root traits.

Grace Cawley will travel from the California Current Ecosystem (CCE) LTER to the Northeast Shelf (NES) LTER to conduct field and laboratory work with scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She will draw on protocols developed within the California Current Ecosystem LTER to explore how NES zooplankton sampling can be extended to support size-resolved and image-based analyses.