Department of Ecology

Lizzy spent her summer at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado conducting fieldwork. Her fieldwork consisted of weekly backpacking trips, battling marmots, and becoming one with the American pika. Specifically, she worked at elevations from 8,000 to 12,000 ft, live-trapping pikas, which she tagged, sampled, and released. Additionally, she deployed sensors under talus to record precise microclimate data. Her work this summer will help her complete her dissertation, which focuses on the evolutionary genetic story of pikas in the southern Rocky Mountains.