SNRE names outstanding student for 2018-2019

Trevor Schoening

The School of Natural Resources and Extension has named Trevor Schoening its outstanding student.

Many natural resources management students discover the degree after signing up for a different major and switching after taking a few classes they like. No so with Trevor, who started college at UAF as a NRM major because he knew he wanted to get a job in an outdoors-related area.

He didn’t have to graduate before experiencing that. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Sitka for three summers, maintaining trails and public use cabins. During the past two semesters, he has worked as a student worker, essentially a farm hand for the Reindeer Research Program, mixing reindeer feed and feeding them, cleaning pens and weighing animals.

Schoening, who is from Sitka, says he has enjoyed the variety of classes he has taken, particularly the introductory NRM class from Susan Todd, a soils class with Mingchu Zhang and geographic information systems (GIS) classes with Dave Verbyla.  Another highlight was the NRM 290 field trip around Alaska with Pete Fix.

“That was an awesome 10 days,” he said. He especially liked seeing farms and  different regions of Alaska on the road tour and meeting professionals who work in the natural resources management area.

Skiing near Thompson Pass.

He has been impressed with faculty, many of whom are involved with outdoor activities and the community. They have also been pretty open to students and willing to lend assistance on projects, he said. Pete Fix helped him with his URSA project last year, in which he inventoried vegetable farmers around the state.

Schoening is not sure what his next step will be, but he wants to spend a summer in the Interior and work for a time while he considers graduate school.

Meriam Karlsson, who is his academic advisor, said Schoening is an excellent student who is interested in everything he studies, which made it challenging for him to choose a minor. He settled on GIS, which is used in many natural resource management jobs. She noted that he has worked on projects in several natural resources management areas, including food security, forestry and GIS.

His hobbies include backcountry and downhill skiing, hiking, travel and camping. Schoening will be honored at an awards breakfast on April 20.

Trevor Schoening mills a sill for a bridge on a U.S. Forest
Service trail rerouting project near Sitka.

 

≈

OneTree Alaska to host birch sap cooperative meeting

OneTree Alaska will host a meeting to organize its birch sap cooperative Friday, March 15, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Nicole Dunham pours birch sap collected on the UAF
campus into another bucket. UAF photo by Todd Paris

Program lead Jan Dawe and OneTree staff will explain how to collect sap and how the cooperative works, and UAF climate researcher Rick Thoman will talk about how to predict green-up.

The meeting will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in the OneTree STEAM studio in the old Lola Tilly Commons kitchen. Buckets, taps, and a limited amount of tubing may be checked out at the meeting or from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, March 16.

This is the third year for the cooperative. Once the birch sap starts flowing in the Interior— usually in mid-April — volunteers collect and bring it to OneTree to be processed. The sap is used in OneTree’s sap processing research and to raise money to support its operations. Sap collectors receive 20 percent of the syrup in exchange for their efforts, a sweet reward. Last year, more than 50 individuals and classrooms from Salcha to Two Rivers collected 4,500 gallons of birch sap.

Although the ratio varies for year to year, Dawe said it takes about 110 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. This year the program will experiment with vacuum pressure methods that will allow the processing crew to reduce the heat used.

The program has birch caramels and birch syrup available for sale. UAF’s birch sap work is modeled on successful maple research programs at the University of Vermont and Cornell University.

OneTree Alaska is an educational and research program affiliated with the UAF School of Natural Resources and Extension and is supported in part by the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. For more information, contact Dawe at jan.dawe@alaska.edu or OneTree at 907-474-5517.