Team Snails: Valentino Orhaitil

The snail group in Hila'an.

Natural resource managers and some students across the Micronesia region were invited to attend a 2 and a half week course on Forest Ecology in Guam and Saipan conducted by University of Guam and Iowa State University. The purpose of the Course was to provide training for some of the natural resources people around Micronesian region. The course is part of USFS (Forest Service), tailored for the forestry professional work. There were 15 total participants from across Micronesia. 

The course consisted of 17-days in session, where students were learning different approaches in recognizing and recalling the major impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems. The course consisted of research and management of pacific island forests in a changing climate. This course will be extremely helpful for the natural resource managers in the whole Micronesia region. While the Course tailored to forestry program efforts, the information will be applicable to most, if not all, novices to forestry service program. The facilitators presented the information through slides, and had groups work together to review questions to give us practice, test understanding and practice hands-on data analysis.

Team Acacia: Victoria Matsunaga

We’re over halfway through the forest ecology course. My group and I have been hard at work going through the forests of both Saipan and Guam for our comparative analysis of the Acacia populations. We’ve been working closely with our mentor Dr. Haldre Rogers. Together, we’ve been given an amazing opportunity to work with people from different parts of Micronesia. In my group, we have a representative from Chuuk, Basiende Atan. Our representative from Kosrae is Maxson Nithan. From Guam, we have Peter Carbullido, and then myself, Victoria Matsunaga from Saipan. We’re almost done with our studies and are more than excited to share our studies!

Eugene Eperiam: Forest Ecology course continues in Guam

The Forest ecology course brings together young brilliant minds from University of Guam (UOG), Northern Marianas College (NMC) and representatives from some Resource Management agencies throughout Micronesia. With all these geographic challenges we face being separated by vast body of waters; culturally we share the same knowledge and dialogue on ecological values within on our jurisdictions.  

These amazing individuals were group into four teams to tackle different areas in forest ecology (Vines, Snails, Acacia, and Flame trees). Each team came up with their own research question and hypothesis. Based on their question and hypothesis, they developed their own protocol to test their hypothesis, and collected their own data spanning urban forested areas all the way to the native undisturbed karst forest of Saipan and Guam.  With their compelling research questions, they are going to compare given areas across Saipan and Guam.