My Latino Conservation Week event went great. I had lots of family and friends who participated in my Nature Therapy event who reached out to me to let me know the great impacts it had on their day. I participated by going to my local park, taking a picnic lunch, and bringing along a good book to read. I spent hours just relaxing and unwinding, it was the perfect end to my work week and perfect way to begin my weekend. 

In recent weeks I’ve made great progress on my citizen science project. I was having some trouble trying to find a prototype that was feasible and inexpensive to construct. The main reason I was having so much trouble was because I was searching for water monitoring tools or experiments that I could simplify and recreate, but the majority of my results were not feasible because they required expensive equipment. I reached out to my mentors for some guidance and decided that I needed to broaden my search by trying to find any prototypes I could build, not just ones related to water monitoring. After finding feasible prototypes, I then wanted to find a way to incorporate them into the Reveal Your River program at SEKI. This method made the search process a lot easier.

My mentor Emily found the idea for my first prototype; a smartphone microscope. I will be constructing a base for any smartphone to sit on and will be using a laser pointer focus lens for the magnification. I think the idea is really cool and I can’t wait till the parts arrive, so I can build it and test it out myself. I will also be having family and friends of different ages and scientific backgrounds test out the microscope as I observe from a safe distance. My goal is for anyone to be able to use the prototype with ease regardless of their background in science. 

I am hoping that I can have the prototype constructed and tested out in time for the conference next week so that I can discuss some of my findings and maybe even show the prototype during my poster presentation. 

Agency: National Park Service

Program: Latino Heritage Internship Program (LHIP)

Location: Sequoia National Forest