Mandy Stone
Hi, my name is Mandy Stone and I participated in the AmeriCorps Stream Team Program from September 2006 to July 2007. I graduated from Kansas State University with degrees in Wildlife Biology and Natural Resource and Environmental Management. I began studying ecology with an exchange scholarship program at Justus-Liebig University (JLU) in Giessen, Germany for my sophomore year and began working at the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), a Long Term Environmental Research (LTER) site, in my junior year at KSU. A large portion of my undergraduate studies at KPBS LTER focused upon the ecological effects of grazing and burning regimes in prairie ecosystems; particularly above and below ground biomass, nutrient cycling, soil ecology, and stream chemistry. Upon graduating, I switched to working in forested ecosystems in Oregon - most of my fieldwork there involved plant and small mammal community responses to various watershed management practices. Then I obtained a Master of Science degree in Zoology at Southern Illinois University (SIU); where my thesis and publications focused upon macroinvertebrate communities, stream chemistry, and riparian vegetation in agriculturally drained streams. I remained at SIU as a doctoral student, where I returned to KPBS LTER to do research and I am currently finishing up a manuscript to be submitted on the structure and function of a prairie stream ecosystem along a gradient from grassy headwaters to gallery forest.
I wanted to broaden my experiences beyond the scientific realm and becoming a Stream Team Assistant was an excellent opportunity to do so. I strongly appreciate and support the efforts of the Missouri Stream Team Program and Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE). I particularly enjoyed interacting with all of the employees in the Missouri Department of Conservation and MCE and was very impressed with the workshops provided by the Department. Much of my work with MCE involved sampling unclassified Missouri streams to achieve the goal of getting more Missouri streams protected. Upon leaving AmeriCorps, I will return to the Pacific Northwest to do research involving forest management practices at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest LTER site in Oregon.