Responsible for supervision of daily operations in the Wildlife Permits Office for the Big Game Program. Our team issues several permits that provide landowners tools to conduct intensive management of native wildlife on private property. Duties include: providing excellent customer service and technical support to a broad customer base; interpretation and administration of state statutes and agency regulations; management and analysis of large amounts of data; production of technical reports and figures for management under deadlines; development and maintenance of a complex online database utilized by internal and external stakeholders; employee hiring and training; organizing teams that include agency and private ranch staff to conduct field inspections and collect biological specimens for disease monitoring and resolving any conflicts that arise in the process.

Worked as a self-employed trim carpenter, specializing in residential construction projects. I maintain a steady business by delivering projects on budget and on time. I am skilled at communicating with everyone involved in the project, including the job supervisor, the client, and other trades to ensure the project in question is completed efficiently and to the highest standards. I am a quick learner and quickly adapt to new jobs.

I held the position of Research Assistant to the Tree Ring Laboratory at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Duties performed in this capacity included field collection of data on forest age and composition, preparation of field collected specimens, and laboratory-based analysis of tree rings for use in dendrochronolgy analysis (several projects I worked on were NSF or NOAA grant funded). Field collection involved both vegetation mapping and wood specimen collection using Swedish increment borers and chainsaws. Preparation of field collected tree increment cores and downed log cross sections required sanding and polishing the specimens to a highly finished surface using a series of increasingly finer grit sanding papers so that the tree rings are well defined. Lab analysis required microscopic viewing of the specimens to accurately date the sequence of tree-rings based on standard dendrochronolgy techniques. Once an accurate date was assigned to each specimen, computer aided measurement of tree-ring widths was performed to allow statistical analysis of tree-ring width series in the programs Cofecha and Arstan.

I served as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas for four semesters. In this capacity I was in charge of teaching and grading up to 4 sections (with up to 24 students each) of the Environmental Geology Lab component. Skills involved lecturing over the week’s lab topic and demonstration of laboratory experiments. Topics included topographic map reading, river systems, groundwater systems, wastewater disposal processes, soils, forest sampling/biodiversity analysis, weather instrumentation and weather mapping. I led three field trips over the course of the semester. I graded all assignments and wrote the examinations for the lab.

As a Forest Technician Intern I helped design an extensive field survey and conducted the field research to analyze the composition, regeneration status, and age structure of the tree component of an old-growth oak-pine forest stand in east central Oklahoma. I surveyed the extent of the forest stand of interest using GPS and then used a combination of the variable radius prism plot and fixed plot sampling techniques to describe both the overstory and understory tree composition of the site. Age analysis of the stand involved randomly sampling shortleaf pine and post oak using a Swedish increment borer. I conducted field work over the course of one month and then processed data for the duration of the temporary position. Stem density and basal area measurements were calculated for overstory and understory trees. Age samples were analyzed using standard tree-ring dating techniques. Spatial distribution of species density and basal area was mapped using a GIS. A full report is presented in my Master's thesis.

I served as a GIS intern with the Ozark Highlands office of the Nature Conservancy for one school year. I worked on two ongoing projects during that time. The first project required editing NHD blue-line files based on recent aerial imagery in ArcMap to more accurately define the course of several water bodies of interest. The second project required georeferencing hundreds of records of aquatic species enocunters and assiging each record a confidence classification for use in an Aquatic GAP study to identify ecologically threatened watersheds. Georeferencing involved importation of x/y coordinate data and the creation of new data points based on a physical description in ArcMap.