Many congratulations to Kelsey for being awarded Canadian Council on Ecological Areas (CCEA) Stan Rowe Home Place Scholarship for 2012. This is a very special national award for student research that contributes to the management or establishment of a network of protected areas across Canada. It’s a competitive award and a great achievement for Kelsey. So what’s so special about Kelsey’s research? Kelsey’s working on our Grasslands National Park grazing experiment. As a manipulative experiment following a Beyond-BACI experimental design, it provides us with a unique opportunity to control for extraneous factors and environmental variability while studying how cattle could best be used to restore ecological integrity to Canada’s only mixed-grass prairie national park. Kelsey’s introduced a component to explore how cattle grazing has variable ecological effects depending on what type of habitat is exposed to grazing, and where that habitat is within each pasture. This is a great example of meshing a long-term project that is bigger than any student could design, and student-driven detailed research. The result is better than either one of them on their own. Congratulations, Kelsey, on your achievement.

All this, and she gets to live in Grasslands National Park all summer! Best of luck to Kelsey, Tonya, Adrienne, Lindsey, and Anke in The Park this summer. I’m sure you’ll have a blast.