From September 29th to October 3rd, Reno, NV played host to the first joint conference of The Wildlife Society and American Fisheries Society. Spread out between the Reno Convention Center and several area hotels, this was the largest gathering of fish and wildlife professionals ever. Indeed, the conference drew around 4,400 participants. As conference organizers explain, this conference provides “[u]nprecedented…

Choosing a winner of our monthly photo contest is an unenviable task, especially when we get as many superb entries as we did in September.  Nevertheless, a winner there is. This month it’s AmeriCorps member, Katie Reisinger. Katie is on a Whitebark Pine Monitoring crew that serves in back-country areas in the Sierra Nevada. In this photo, above, you can…

Yet again, we’ve received a bunch of great submissions to the GBI photo/media contest, including the winner displayed at the top of this page. This beautiful night sky photo was submitted by Alessandra Puig-Santana, Spanish Language Social Media Technician at Joshua Tree National Park. (Learn more about Alessandra’s work HERE.) Below you’ll find the August finalists, which we opened up…

GBI is proud to present our first bilingual Field Update. Our thanks to Socorro Cardoso for providing the Spanish translation located below. Socorro Cardoso’s experiences with our national parks speak volumes: “I am a Latina woman who grew up in a low socioeconomic household in Los Angeles. I never visited a national park until finally, in my junior year of…

A legacy of the fevered search for gold in the West, there are over 300 abandoned mines in Joshua Tree National Park, so many that they have become an indelible part of the park’s landscape. Mine shafts have come to serve as wildlife habitats, especially for bats, and they provide a good source for cultural resources studies. But they also…

In July, we received a bunch of great submissions for our media contest. Below is just a sampling of what our field personnel were able to capture, including the winning entry, video shot by Cecilia Huizar. “I feel lucky to say that this is what we get to do every morning,” says Cecilia. “Here is my crew lead, Liz (Elizabeth…

Clearer water means high quality water, right? Well, not necessarily. Take Lake Mead as an example, where clearing water is actually evidence of the impact of the quagga mussel. This mollusk was introduced to the Great Lakes from Ukraine in the 1980s and was first discovered in Lake Mead in 2007, and as an invasive species, its impact in considerable….

GBI’s field personnel continue to dazzle us with their photographs. Here we present just a few of many submissions to our monthly photo contest, including June’s winning image, above. This one was taken by Wade Plafcan, an ecological monitoring crew lead working alongside the Bureau of Land Management in Moab, Utah. Castleton Tower can be seen in the background of…

Red Rock Canyon was designated as Nevada’s first National Conservation Area (NCA) in 1990. This NCA is a popular tourist area, as well as a recreation destination for locals. Visitors use the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area for hiking, road biking, rock climbing, and horseback riding. But as pointed out in a recent article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal,…

Our field personnel frequently work in some stunning landscapes, unique with fauna, flora, climates and geological formations. In the interest of capturing these settings and the work being done, GBI recently started a photo/media contest for our people in the field. The first contest winner is Kristen Smith, whose photo graces the top of this page. Coordinating the contest is…